Hi, I’m Kathie.
I’m not a therapist. I’m not a clinician. I’m a mom, and I’ve spent over fifteen years raising my son Levi, who is on the autism spectrum and has a history of childhood apraxia. Everything I know, I learned the way most of us do: by living it, researching it at 1 a.m., getting it wrong, and trying again.
The Moment That Started It All
The First Time He Smiled
Levi was about a year old, doing tummy time, and I was doing what every parent does, talking to him, playing, waiting. Then he smiled. Just a small movement of his lips, and this look in his eyes at me. I didn’t know then that we’d be waiting a long time for the next facial expression, or the next word. I cried, because for the first time I had hope that things were going to be okay. I also knew, in that same moment, that it was going to take time.
That single smile is the reason NeuroFamily Co exists. Every family I work with is somewhere on their own version of that wait, for the smile, the word, the friend, the milestone nobody can promise you a date for. I know what it is to sit inside that waiting.
What Fifteen Years Taught Me
Riding a Bike
Levi struggled with the kind of cross-body coordination and multi-step processing that riding a bike quietly demands, and it took six years, from age five to eleven, of tricycles, Velcroed feet, and patient repetition before he pedaled on his own for the first time, alone, in the hallway of his OT clinic.
Hi, Hi, Hi
Some of it came all at once, like the drive home from dinner when he was three, three years into therapy with barely a prompted word, and he suddenly screamed “hi, hi, hi” out the car window at everything he saw. No cueing. No prompting. Just joy. I cried and laughed at the same time.
I share these because they’re real, not because they’re tidy. Progress with a neurodivergent child rarely looks like a straight line. It looks like years of small, unglamorous repetition that one day adds up to something enormous.
Why I Do This Work
I built NeuroFamily Co because I remember what it felt like to have no one who really got it. Not because they didn’t care, but because they hadn’t lived it. I wanted to be the person I needed back then: someone who won’t hand you a textbook, who will sit with you in the hard, overwhelmed, 2 a.m.-Googling moments and help you find real, practical footing.
I work with families in St. Louis in person, and with families everywhere else virtually. Wherever you are on this road, new diagnosis or fifteen years in like me, you are not alone in it.
See How We Can Work Together