Jennifer Layton

They say that people are happiest when they love the work they do. I didn’t find my calling until I was in my 40s but it had been staring me in the face my whole life. I grew up in the Navy and my family moved every three or four years. Everywhere we went, no matter how small or run-down our base housing was, my mother always made it feel like home…like we had been there forever. I started a career in government contracting in the mid 1980s because it was the thing to do. I worked at the Pentagon and the Naval Research Lab, which sounded exciting but it was truly boring. I didn’t feel that I was accomplishing anything of value. After I got married, I decided it was time for a change. I worked as an administrator for a small real estate company in Northern Virginia. Still, I wasn’t quite happy. I had children, moved to Fredericksburg and became a full-time mom. I loved it! I would think back to all the places I had lived as a child and it would always remind me of how important it was t