Hello, hello, hello. I'm Annie.

It started with a sketchbook.

I had my first daughter, Audrie, at seventeen. I needed a childcare job so I could keep her with me, and to bring my stepdaughter along she had to be out of diapers. So I put her in underwear, said no more diapers, made no big deal of the misses, and she was trained in about two weeks.

Then I asked the parents in my classroom if I could do the same with their toddlers. They said yes, and by the end of the month all twenty-four children were out of diapers. I wrote the whole method out by hand in a sketchbook and copied it at the copy machine. I called it "let it pee," and that sketchbook is still in my memory box.

Then my son got sick.

Tabor had a cough and was given albuterol. After that his body broke out in chronic hives that would not stop, and then came an anxiety so big it swallowed him. The answers we were given didn't reach the root, so I pulled the emergency lever.

I healed and sealed his gut with the GAPS protocol. We worked with Chinese and Western herbs. I studied pediatric Shonishin with Bob Quinn. We left the city, moved to the country, and put him in a farm school so his nervous system could settle. He healed. Somewhere in those years it all connected for me: the gut is tied to the brain, the brain to the nervous system, and food, movement and regulation are not separate things.

Twenty years with mothers, one to one.

I've spent over twenty years in practice with mothers as a pelvic floor therapist, a clinical family herbalist in the vitalist tradition, a somatic practitioner, a functional nutritionist and a nervous system educator. I ran Yoga Union in Portland for nearly twenty years. Doman International reviewed my Primal Potty Training™ method personally and endorsed it.

What I've learned is that every mother I've worked with already knew what her child needed. The work was never about more information. It was about learning to trust what she already knew.