Eli and I sat down one afternoon at our kitchen table so I could ask him a few questions parents might be curious about.
These are them!
I hope it gives you a sense of who we are.
—Abby
June, 19th, 2026
You and Roby spent this morning together while I was working on a tiling project, what were the two of you up to?
We listened to Shonen Knife, a Japanese pop-punk band my mom played a lot when I was a kid. I have no idea how she discovered them, and neither does she. They sing about cookies and hot chocolate and other food, so it seemed appropriate for breakfast.
Then Roby decided she didn't want pancakes, and she spent a while coloring on my hands with markers. I have a lot of tattoos, so she wanted to add to them.
Why are we doing this?
Why KinderHolden, why now?
Why KinderHolden, why now?
Roby was the catalyst. Without her, and without her friends, I wouldn't have known how much I love children. And without that love, I wouldn't have started KinderHolden. So that was the real starting point. Our love for her.
When she was very young and we began thinking about where to send her for daycare, I think we realized pretty quickly the lack of quality programs in Vermont. We didn't feel confident we'd be able to secure her a place we'd be happy with, and this is her childhood we're talking about. Most of her waking hours were going to be spent at this place. It had to be right.
My love for this person, my commitment to her, my anxiety around how few quality programs there are, and the dawning realization that I really like spending time with children, all crashed together to make KinderHolden not only necessary, but inevitable.
Tell me about your mom, the one who showed you that Japanese band you were listening to.
People who know you know how much she shaped you.
People who know you know how much she shaped you.
My mom is a really special lady. The third daughter of seven, born to Italian immigrants in Montreal. She broke the mold as a punk-rock graphic designer and artist. She met my dad at Dawson University in Montreal before moving to Vermont to start the very design studio I ended up working at for half a decade before starting KinderHolden.
I grew up with pretty severe dyslexia, and my mom took charge of helping me get the education I needed. For that I'm forever grateful. And, you know, because she gave birth to me and loves me and will definitely read this. Hey mom, love you.
That education sounds unusual.
Tell me a bit more about it, and how it shapes KinderHolden.
Tell me a bit more about it, and how it shapes KinderHolden.
When you're in it, when you're a kid, the amount of work being done in the background to make your childhood as beautiful as it can be often goes unseen. Looking back now, it's really bringing into focus just how much work my mom put in to help me grow.
I went to outdoor programs at Shelburne Farms. I was part of special-education cohorts at Williston Central School alongside autistic and otherwise neurodivergent kids. I had a lost year at Edmunds where I made good friends but regressed badly in terms of literacy. I attended the Lake Champlain Waldorf School, where I finally learned to read in the fourth grade. And between it all, tutors, summer school, summer camp, art camp, friends, and a wide community of pretty incredible grown-ups.
What I remember most is the great breadth of people I learned from. That's precisely what I'm hoping to make happen at KinderHolden. The garden and valley and brooks are a hub around which a wheel of community spins, with visiting artists, specialists, and friends to make it a more holistic and comprehensive place for the kids it shapes.
What do you actually like about small children?
I've often joked that getting to spend time with kids is like being in the company of a Bodhisattva or a Saint. I once heard from a priest that if you're having difficulty discerning what to do in a given situation, a surefire way to gain uncut insight is to ask the nearest child under five. It's something of a joke. It's also true.
Kids can have a hard time keeping their socks on because they're too tight, and they might lack the gross motor skills to flip a pancake without folding it in half, but the honesty and verve with which they go about every single thing is just astonishing. The level of authenticity, truth, feeling, passion, excitement, joy, and humor brought by even a crawling not-yet-talking baby is something I've been surprised by again and again.
Before starting KinderHolden, I worked as a brand strategist and writer. I spent most of my days interviewing very intelligent professionals, trying to distill their insight into marketing strategy. You have got to believe me when I say the wisdom on display by any two-year-old I have ever met is of more striking clarity than even the most successful entrepreneur I've spoken with.
OK, but what about the hard moments?
The meltdowns, the biting, the child who won't stop hitting another.
How do you handle that?
The meltdowns, the biting, the child who won't stop hitting another.
How do you handle that?
As astonishing as the insight a toddler can offer is, their behavior can be just as baffling. But I get it. I also do not like the moment when a sweater I'm pulling over my head is too tight, or my socks are misaligned, or my banana has too many strings on it. For a kid, that's just a bigger deal. It's a far higher percentage of their total experience. And they don't have the lifetime of experience enduring the small inconveniences, indignities, and discomforts that life throws at us every day.
That's a lot of what we're trying to teach in these early years. How to move through life with ease.
It's like teaching math. If your child is having a hard time learning algebra, you don't admonish them for it. You get more patient. And let me tell you, learning to put up with the often inane and always ubiquitous discomfiture of life is a lot harder than learning math.
So when a child is having a hard time, when they don't want to go outside or finish their banana, when they throw the banana or hit another child out of the frustration all but guaranteed by their still-developing brains and hearts, the only answer is greater tenderness.
Easier said than done. But I've found that accessing that well of patience becomes a lot easier when, as we have here, you decide it's the entirety of what you're doing. We're not working some other job. We're not writing the great American novel. We're cultivating the best place for children that we possibly can. That's the beginning and the end of it.
Tell me about the land.
What does the daily physical world look like for a child at KinderHolden?
What does the daily physical world look like for a child at KinderHolden?
KinderHolden is a home daycare, so it's centered around our home. Outside, where we spend most of our time, is a very beautiful old honey locust tree with a swing, a platform for a canvas tent where the children nap, a hammock, an outdoor kitchen, a fire pit, a deck, the garden, and a lot more. It's changing all the time, really, I'm constantly building stuff and adapting the environment to fit the needs of our family and community. All of it is enclosed and protected by a large deer fence, which allows us to enjoy the space without worrying about the animals that would otherwise undo our good work.
The forest and brook outside that walled garden is where we go on adventures throughout the day. To see the brook, or the deer trails. There are many small, beautiful places tucked away in the forest. They change throughout the year, so visiting them intermittently can be fascinating for people young and not-so-young.
There is a fire pit, a brook, an outdoor kitchen.
A nervous parent might love or panic at any of those.
How do you think about risk with small kids?
A nervous parent might love or panic at any of those.
How do you think about risk with small kids?
When I was first conceiving of KinderHolden I did a great deal of fairly obvious research. I did the reading. Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, Ivan Illich's de-schooling philosophy.
We've drawn from all that reading a combination of what we liked about each philosophy. The child-led engagement of Montessori, applied to a Vermont homestead. The aesthetic unity and appreciation of beauty beloved by anyone who's been to a Waldorf school. The reality-rooted, community-oriented thinking of Illich. All of it oriented toward the divine inspiration of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.
With all that in mind, we've created something far from the padded cell provided by many daycares in this country, opting instead for a walled garden. There are dangerous things in the garden, as there are in any garden. Splinters and thorns, sunburns and bugs. But there is not a place within these walls that cannot be seen from everywhere else within them, and there is nothing within them that hasn't been carefully considered for the benefit of the children that spend their time here.
This is a place chiefly of learning. Yes, of our letters and our numbers, of stories and prayers. But also of place, and home, and activity across it. How should we behave around a fire? How heavy is a hemlock two-by-four cut just down the road at Fontaine's mill? What can we do with both of those things? All of this we learn by doing, and well under the supervision of a person glad to imbue such knowledge.
You and I are Orthodox Christian.
How does that show up in the daily life of the daycare?
What would a secular family experience?
How does that show up in the daily life of the daycare?
What would a secular family experience?
Yes, we're Orthodox, but as a close friend and monastic said: Orthodoxy does not have a monopoly on Wisdom. You and I both grew up secular. We came to Orthodoxy together, and we came to it through community. We didn't find our parish online or through research. We visited on a lark and fell in love with the people there and with the tradition they were keeping.
So how does this all materialize for KinderHolden? Chiefly as a lens by which we can learn a love of the world. Through the poetic tradition of many learned spiritual men and women. Through the lives of the saints. Through the artistic tradition of the faithful, not just Christians, but Buddhists and more.
We are not working to evangelize. We're treating Orthodoxy as a very strong and very beautiful way of seeing and engaging with the world.
Before this, you spent nearly a decade as a brand strategist and writer at the agency your parents started, working directly with your father as creative director. What did that work teach you that you use now with children?
Working with my dad as my creative director for six years was a real privilege. Not many people get to spend their twenties being mentored by a parent who happens to be a master of the trade. And it was personal. The closeness that makes it possible to do good work together is the same closeness that makes the work matter in a way most jobs don't. When my dad gave me notes on a piece of writing, he wasn't just my creative director. He was my dad. I learned a lot about humility and a lot about love.
What he taught me, more than anything else, was how to see. The most important ability of that work was to see a person, a client, an industry, and with profound curiosity and empathy, distill what might be most true or interesting for them, and communicate that back with simple honesty and unbridled passion. It really required a childlike ability to see a thing for what it is, and to love it with an open heart. I watched my dad do this for clients for years before I could do it myself.
I grew up in a brand studio, so eventually it came naturally to me. I got pretty good at it.
Then I met my daughter, and realized I was an amateur.
Her ability to see just how beautiful and strange and compelling the world is, from the biggest macrocosmic events to the very smallest things I had overlooked for decades, was a revelation. It is in the noticing, both of what is beautiful and of the noticing itself, that I believe my father and the work he gave me to do trained me best.
What does a good day at KinderHolden look like?
A good day at KinderHolden is one where it rained a bit, but we all felt good about it. Where we made art under cover, and it was in that weather, the weather we thought we didn't like, that we saw something we didn't expect. Marbleized paper in the drizzle. A frog basking in the rain that we caught and released.
Last one. A parent reads this and is deciding whether to send you an inquiry.
What do you hope they feel?
What do you hope they feel?
Excitement. We're doing this interview, I'm preparing the website, finishing the fence, one of the hundreds of little things I need to be doing this summer to prepare for the opening of KinderHolden, and I am buzzing. Part of that is because I have a lot to do, but part of it is because I am thrilled to be doing this. To be creating such a beautiful place for children to be. For my own children to be. I hope they see, on this website, or in this post, a place worth getting excited about.