I am an SLP, a business owner, a wife, and a mom who is committed to learning and growing as a speech-language pathologist and sharing my knowledge and experience with my community. I am truly passionate about educating my fellow SLPs and parents with the knowledge that I WISH I had 20 years ago! I was never taught about gestalt language processing in graduate school, my externships, or during my clinical fellowship year. When it came to echolalia, I was taught to ignore and redirect.

It wasn't until much later in my career that I learned echolalia communicates - a serendipitous moment in 2016 when I was introduced to Marge Blanc’s book, Natural Language Acquisition on the Autism Spectrum: The Journey from Echolalia to Self-Generated Language. As soon as I heard about her book, I immediately bought it and read it cover to cover. That is when I truly began to understand gestalt language development and why my clients were communicating with delayed echolalia. Once I implemented my new knowledge into therapy, it was immediately obvious this approach was WORKING! I finally began to see tremendous growth in the most complex communicators. I reached out to Marge right away and began one of the most meaningful mentorships and collaborations of my career. Marge helped me every step of the way and has given her input, editing skills, and time to the Meaningful SpeechTM course.  Meaningful SpeechTM is now my way to spread the career-changing knowledge of the Natural Language Acquisition framework (Blanc, 2012) while helping parents, speech-language pathologists and related professionals turn their knowledge into action.