I am parenting kids who need skills I am still developing myself.

Some I never had. Some I lost somewhere in decades of masking. Some I'm building in real time, right alongside them.

This episode is about what it actually looks like to parent ND kids while figuring out your own brain. The hard moments, the repair, what they've taught me that I didn't expect, and what I most want them to know.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

Episode 10: Learning Out Loud

Content note: includes a brief, lightly veiled reference to a difficult childhood moment involving suicidal thoughts.

He'd get two scoops of butter pecan in a sugar cone. I'd get lemon custard. He always finished first. I never understood how.

This episode is about my Daddio. About what it means to have one steady, present, reliable person when everything else is uncertain. About how one person being truly there can be the difference.

He's 86. He's still here, and I am so grateful.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina
Episode 9: Dads Who Show Up

Your nervous system is not being dramatic. I promise.

This episode is about sensory processing differences...what's actually happening neurologically, why it gets mistaken for trauma or personality, and what it looks like when two kids in the same house have completely different reactions to the same MIDI music toy.

Also: why I always had an earbud in at every office job I ever had, and why that was never actually about the music.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

Episode 8: The Sensory World Nobody Talks About

Too little routine and everything feels like freefall. Too much and it starts to feel like a cage. Somewhere in between is the sweet spot, and finding it is a daily negotiation.

This episode is about what it actually looks like to hold structure loosely when you're ND, homeschooling twin boys, and standing in a hotel room at vacation while someone cries about socks.

The socks were never about the socks.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

Episode 7: Routine Without Rigidity

When someone says accommodations are "special treatment," I want to ask special treatment compared to what?

This episode is about the curb cut effect, why designing for the people who struggle most makes things better for everyone, and what I learned from years of taking zeros on homework I had actually done.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

Episode 6: Accommodations Aren't Just For Broken People

Getting a late diagnosis is supposed to feel like relief, and it does... Then the grief hits.

This episode is about what nobody tells you comes after the answer. The friendships that didn't work because nobody taught you the skills you needed. The therapy that helped but never quite got to the root. The fawn response, and why you spent so many years making yourself easy to keep for people who weren't worth keeping.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

Episode 5: The Late Diagnosis Grief

I started dieting at eleven. I was told I'd be prettier if I lost weight at five years old. I spent decades punishing my body instead of living in it.

Then at 17, I tried taekwondo, and everything I thought I knew about my body turned out to be wrong.

This episode is about the long, complicated road from hating your body to understanding it. Yo-yo dieting, interoception, a 2020 health scare that changed everything, and what I learned about my own body that eventually made me a coach.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

Ep. 4: The First Time My Body Surprised Me

You were never lying. You were never being fake. You were just a kid trying to get through the day without getting it wrong.

This episode is about masking, the thousand small adjustments ND people make every day to seem like they fit. Where it starts, what it costs, and what it looks like when you finally, slowly begin to take it off.

Spoiler: it looks like Lego, crochet, and a Doctor Who hoodie over a Hamilton shirt.

Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

Episode 3: Performing Normal (And Fooling No One)