Olive Branch

From the Heart of The Olive Leopard: where motherhood, memories, and meaning meet.

An olive branch has always symbolized peace — but to me, it also represents what’s worth holding onto.

Olive Branch is my quiet space. A place to slow down, reflect, and hold onto the moments motherhood often asks us to move past too quickly. 

The Olive Leopard was created from a place of preserving meaning. Olive Branch is where I get to talk about why all of that matters.

I named this space Olive Branch because it feels like an offering — a pause, a reminder, an invitation to choose meaning over clutter. In a world that constantly tells us to declutter, move on, and make room for the next thing, Olive Branch is about honoring what’s worth keeping.

The memories.

The moments.

The art that tells our story.

My January moodboard has a fresh feel — innovative, clean, new (or at least new to me), simple, and strong. I’m sliding — and let’s be honest, mostly slipping — into this new year with my sights set on my family, my business, and myself. I want to do things with more intention.

Somewhere between school art projects, crumpled drawings, and a fridge that could not survive one more magnet, I realized something: not everything is meant to be thrown away. I wanted a way to hold onto the best moments of life.

This is my fourth year teaching early childhood elementary. I started in first grade, moved to second, taught first-grade summer school, and now I’m trying my hand at kindergarten. My very first year teaching, I made a binder labeled “Reasons I Teach.” I vowed to keep drawings and artwork my students gave me — something to look back on when the days felt heavy and the why felt far away.

On any given day, I could easily be handed 87 drawings of a flower that somehow resembles a frog in a tutu. Try throwing away a six-year-old’s masterpiece. I dare you. And once you’ve failed, smoothed the paper, added a bright yellow star sticker, and accepted a spoon as a “phone,” you’ll understand exactly what I mean.

The New Year brings this quiet pressure to start over — to reset, declutter, and move on. But this year, I found myself thinking less about what I want to let go of… and more about what I want to keep. It’s okay to carry pieces of the past forward.

This past year wasn’t gentle. It was my first full year in business. My sweet girl turned one. My boys fully stepped into their teenage attitudes. And life threw me some seriously hard moments — the kind you don’t see coming and the kind that change you. But in all of that rough, there was clarity.

It reminded me that intention is everything:

the intention to belong,

to persevere,

to show up,

and to truly be wherever your feet are.

Olive Branch is where I lay down the noise and pick up what matters most.

If this resonates with you, I’d love for you to follow along — and you’re always welcome to join our Facebook VIP group if you want to be part of what’s growing here.