I'm nine years old and very active. I'm always doing cartwheels. I like to go to the Climbing Wall and rock climb, and go bowling with my dad and brother. I also like to draw and sculpt with clay.

I'm home-schooled, so my mom is kind of like my private teacher. She teaches me math, American history, and social studies. I like learning at home because I don't have to be really quiet and I can get a snack or drink any time I want. Every day I do things differently. Sometimes I do math first, sometimes piano. My grammy is a professional writer and pianist. She gives me piano lessons.

I'm also taking a class in Chinese. I picked Chinese because my friend Alessandra speaks Chinese, and I thought it would be fun to have a secret language we could speak together. Chinese is fun to speak because the same word can mean five different things depending on what tone of voice you use.

My brother, James, who's 16, is home-schooled, too. James does harder things than I do, like algebra. It doesn't look too hard, though—my mom says I'll be doing it in a few years or so. Sometimes I play video game doubles with James, or just watch him play them, which is fun, too.

I live in a three-story Victorian house with a relief sculpture of a wolf on one side. I live in the city of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh has a lot of parks for me to do cartwheels in. It's also special because it has three rivers and a great dinosaur collection in its natural history museum. It's cool to think that something as big as a dinosaur might have once walked right in my backyard.

My favorite books are the Harry Potter series. My friend Katie and I are both into Harry Potter. Right now we are working on a fashion magazine called Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall. I am mostly drawing the pictures, and she is mostly writing the stories.

Every year the home-schooling group I belong to puts on a history fair. Kids work on projects at home and then display them. All our home-school families are invited to come to the fair. Last year I chose to do a project on Mary Baker Eddy. I made a diorama (which is a model inside a box) of Mrs. Eddy writing Science and Health in her room. I made a tiny desk and a tiny Mary Baker Eddy figure out of Sculpey—a clay you mold and then bake in the oven. I also made a poster of all the important things that she did in her life, and put copies of Science and Health, The Christian Science Journal, the Christian Science Sentinel, and The Christian Science Monitor out for people to look at.

The church I go to is in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. I like my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Bohl. She tells me stories out of the Bible in class. My favorite Bible story is about the prodigal son. I like how the father forgave his son, even though what the son did was not smart. He had gone off and spent all his money on junk.

Then he started getting very poor, and he decided to go back to his father. When he went back, his father was very happy to see him and had a party for him. The message of that story is: Even if you do something stupid and worthless and you end up in trouble, God is always loving and protecting you. 

The best day of my life was when I got my dog, Ti Chu. It was pretty late in the evening and very stormy out. My mom and dad had said they were going on an errand. They had taken the cellphone along, and they called me and told me they were bringing home a puppy! I was really happy. 

Ti Chu is a mutt—half Yorkie and half Shih Tzu. He's very cute. He's sandy-colored and fluffy. I play with Ti Chu, brush him, wash him, and fix his hair so it doesn't get in his eyes. He comes walking over to me on his hind legs when I have a treat for him.

I have another dog named Suzy, who is a golden retriever. But she's not golden, she's red. I also have three cats—one is longhaired and gray, named Felix. He's a real klutz. I also have a gray cat named Shadow, and a black cat named Gypsy. And I have eight fish.

I've always loved animals. When I was really little, I used to help worms that I found on the sidewalk—I would move them off into the grass so they wouldn't fry in the sun. It was like I was a worm mother.

One of the first things that I learned and memorized from Science and Health was, "All of God's creatures, moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible" (p. 514). I almost think of it as a prayer.

For instance, when I was afraid to go in the ocean because of sharks, I thought about how God made all His creatures harmless, and that helped me. I also thought about the same idea when there was a tiny mouse in my room, and I was afraid our cats were going to get it. Then the mouse jumped on my bed, and my mother was able to put a wastebasket over it. We took it outside and let it go.

Once my neighbor's cat, Possum, was clutching a bird between his paws, and I saw that it was still alive. I took the bird away from Possum, and my friend Kyra and I took the bird to a grassy spot to examine it. My mom put the bird in a box, and I started praying as hard as I could. Then the bird left the box, crawled under our fence, and flew away. I was really happy because I knew God had helped the bird.

I like all animals, and I like the part in the Bible that says the lion shall lie down with the lamb (see Isa. 11:6). My mom always tells me when I see animals attacking each other on TV that that is "the upside down creation." What she means is that in God's kingdom, there are no predators or prey.

One time at the Science Center in Pittsburgh, they had some Madagascar hissing cockroaches. These were large, scary-looking bugs, but they were really harmless and interesting. We were allowed to hold them, and I kissed one. The other kids thought it was gross. When I kissed the hissing cockroach, he didn't make a sound. It didn't feel slimy or anything, but it did feel hard, like kissing an egg. I would do it again any time.