About Tanel

Tanel is first a mom to two boys, Noah (07/03) and Kellan (03/06), wife to Tom since 2001 (at the age of 29 even though she always swore she wouldn’t marry before the age of 30), and a part-time civil (geotechnical and environmental) engineer. Other than her family, her passion in life is to travel the world, which has been on hold since the kids were born. She lived in Turkey for the first 9 years of her life, born to a Turkish father and American mother who met in college in the early 60’s in Michigan. In 1980, they moved to Clearwater, Florida where she spent the rest of her formative years. She received her B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Florida (go Gators!) in 1995 and has since worked as a consulting engineer in Gainesville, Florida, Los Angeles, California, and Jacksonville, Florida where she now resides. Her early jobs supported her passion of travel. She has been to many places (including various western European countries, Egypt, India, Nepal, Thailand, and New Zealand) but not nearly as many as she would love to visit - it is big world! She loves new places, meeting, new people, and experiencing new things.

Why are we doing this? Tom started writing for a website (Audioholics) just after we bought our house in 2004 and set up our home theater room which he had been researching for the first two years of our marriage. His writing has transitioned from being a hobby to supplemental income to a part-time position to a full-time position. Most recently, he started doing a podcast for them. So here we are; nice podcasting equipment in our house, a podcasting room, and a healthy and stable relationship.

Through our years of being parents, we’ve discovered that we don’t parent the way our pediatricians, certain books, and random people in the supermarket think we should. We’ve also discovered that there are plenty of people out there like ourselves - they don’t necessarily do things the way we do, they just trust their instincts over the word of any doctor or “expert”. Of course, they listen to others, but when that advice contradicts their own instincts (like letting your 4 month old scream themselves to sleep), they rely on their instincts and their partner. Our mission is to let other people know that this way of parenting is very normal.