Our Story

How Children of AWE began, and where it is going.

My name is Soumya. I grew up in India and live now with my husband and two children in the United States. Our daughter is thirteen; our son is seven.

Before the children

I studied business management and worked for several years in advertising and banking — first in India, then in Australia after I married. Throughout those corporate years, I felt an itch I could not quite name — a longing to do something with my hands, to not spend my life looking at a screen.

When I learned I was pregnant with my daughter, I left my job. We moved to the United States when she was almost two. I taught myself to knit from YouTube. I began reading parenting books seriously — Reggio, Montessori, Waldorf — and decided early that I wanted to raise my daughter screen-free, in a home shaped by attention and slowness and the natural world. I was not sure exactly what I was building then. I knew only that I wanted to build it.

A life of making

I taught myself to sew in 2015. Around the same time, I watched The True Cost — a documentary about the human and environmental costs of fast fashion — and let it change me. From then on, every piece of clothing my daughter wore was something I had made for her, from organic and ethically sourced fabrics I had vetted myself. I blogged about sewing and wrote for some of the larger sewing sites. From 2019 to 2023, I ran a successful Etsy shop, designing specialized sleeves for children with eczema — a small product that helped many families. I closed it in 2023 to give my full attention to homeschooling.

I have always been a writer too. I wrote poetry as a child, and I write now — picture books for children, drawn from the simple, joyful Indian childhood of the 1990s that I want this generation of children to be able to glimpse. My first picture book, Four Clothes, is currently on submission.

A love of seasons

I have always lived in rhythm with the seasons of food. As a child in India, I waited for summer because summer meant mangoes, for winter because winter meant sapotas and crunchy grapes. The pleasure was partly the fruit, but partly the waiting — each season carried its own taste and its own meaning. I loved too the small daily encounters at the market — the casual conversations with the fruit and vegetable sellers, buying food from someone whose face you knew.

Now, here in the United States, the farmers’ markets are how I keep that thread alive. I will drive a long way to a good one. I shop seasonally because seasonality is how I learned, very young, that food is supposed to feel. My next picture book is about exactly this.

The garden

Gardening came later. I was not a child of gardens — I noticed almost no plants growing up, except one beautiful Sampige tree in my neighborhood with its heavenly fragrance, and the tamarind trees at school, whose pods we plucked and ate at recess. That was all.

In 2019, when we had our first home with a backyard, I began to garden in earnest. I had read enough by then to understand the difference between homegrown and store-bought food — the gap in nutrition, the burden of pesticides. My first season, I sewed my own grow bags, and grew strawberries and radishes in them. The garden has grown every year since. Today, it is one of the most important rooms of our homeschool.

Why I homeschool

Our formal homeschooling began in 2023, when things went awry at my daughter’s school and I seized the opening to answer a calling I had carried for years. But in truth, I have been raising my children this way — slowly, deliberately, with attention — since my daughter was born almost fourteen years ago. The decision to make it formal has been one of the most beautiful of my life.

Underneath the choice, though, is a simpler longing: I wanted to build a home full of laughter. A home where my children would grow up alongside a present parent, with conversation and books and a garden and slow, unhurried days. A home where learning would feel playful and intrinsic — the way I once knew it could feel, as a child who loved teaching herself.

Children of AWE is, in many ways, the home I dreamed of as a child. I am grateful every day that I get to build it for my own children now.

Where this is going

The longer arc of Children of AWE is community. What began as one family’s quiet way of learning has, over the years, become a vision I want to share — a co-op of families gathered around the same touchstones, growing food together, raising children together, building the kind of village that makes a gentler education possible. We are not there yet, but we are moving toward it slowly, with care.

If anything in this story sounds like the life you have been quietly longing for too, I would love to walk this road with you.

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Céad míle fáilte.