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Adventures in Mommyhood: Breastfeeding
With this post, we pick up where the Pregnancy Blog left off and kick off the new year with a regular series entitled “Adventures in Mommyhood”. As with the Pregnancy Blog, we hope you NurturMoms & Dads out there will weigh in with your own tales, advice, and thoughts about the adventures (and misadventures) of parenting.
I have a love/hate relationship with breastfeeding. In the early days with Elle, it was mostly hate. I didn’t remember it being this hard with Audrey! Why was I engorged all the time? Why did I seemingly always have either a baby or a breast pump attached to me? Why was this such a commitment? I mean, really – it’s too easy for moms – deliriously tired, emotionally spent, desperate-for-some-normalcy moms to decide early on, this is for the birds! But lately – at last – my hate has turned to love, as the weeks have gone by and I’ve gotten into my nursing groove.
A few weeks ago, a mere nine weeks post-partum, I was still in the “mostly hate” phase of breastfeeding. I was jolted back into my work routine by having to make a one-day business trip to Chicago to meet with the buyer of a huge national retail chain. The meeting itself didn’t make me nervous one bit; I didn’t flinch for a second that the success of this meeting could potentially double next year’s revenues. But wrapping my head around pumping throughout the day (when? where?), traveling with the breast milk, having enough of it stashed for my little one back home – these things gave me a stomach ache for days leading up to the trip.
On the morning I was to leave for Chicago, things got off to a great start. I woke up to a 4:30 alarm, dressed in the clothes laid out at the foot of the bed, left an emergency bottle of breast milk on the bedside table for my husband, then air-kissed him and the babe good-bye with my fingers crossed. I showed up at the airport for my one-day trip looking like an overdressed Christmas tree weighed down by ornaments. Dangling from my limbs were a laptop, purse, breastpump, and a cooler for breast milk. I had brought these things not knowing how or where they’d be used, but confident I could figure it out and would get the necessary assistance along the way. That turned out to be mostly true.
Prior to my departing flight, I was relieved to find a “Special Assistance” restroom with an outlet and countertop, perfect for pumping. Setting up the pump, I was positively smug – working mom on the go! Taking care of business! Comically, I even had the laptop out on the countertop in front of me and caught up on emails while I pumped. Though self-satisfied, I was also genuinely relieved to know this could be done, and that it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d anticipated.
Cut to about 10 hours later, and I was positively bedraggled. Read the rest of this entry »
We Made Star Magazine’s Hot List
Star Magazine, one of our favorite guilty pleasures, put us on their “Hot Sheet” a few weeks ago – we’ve officially arrived! 
What Do Dads Think of NM?
See the original and check out DadLabs at their awesome site by clicking here.
Top 10 Things We Love About Being A Small Business
In honor of Small Business Saturday on November 26, we have compiled a list of things we love about being a small business.
10. Wearing yoga pants and socks to work.
9. Getting the help of friends & family during work events.
8. Office walls filled with newspaper clippings and other mementos from our journey.
7. “Yacht Rock” internet radio, the soundtrack of our workday.
6. Brainstorming sessions around the kitchen table.
5. The personal sense of pride from reading a favorable product review.
4. The thrill of getting a “yes” from a buyer!
3. Getting to see our kids & pets during the workday.
2. Laughing all day long.
1. Inspiring others to live their dreams.
A List Baby gives two spoons up!
AListBaby Loves : NurturMe
Read the original post on 12/11/2011 here.
Celebrity moms including Selma Blair, Tiffani Thiessen and Laila Ali are raving over NurturMe. It is a line of baby food that is certified-organic, and made from quick-dried fruits and vegetables. By quick-drying its ingredients, NurturMe preserves the vital nutrients and phytochemicals found in fruits and vegetables. The company has announced the introduction of two yummy new flavors: “Sweet Bananas” and “Crunchy Carrots.” They are all-natural, gluten-free and have no added salts, sugars, colors or preservatives. Sounds pretty good, right? In addition, the fruits and vegetables used in NurturMe come from certified organic farms in the United States. NurturMe is convenient, too—you can just mix one of the palm-sized packets of NurturMe with breast milk, whole milk, formula or water. You can check out some recipe combinations on this video.
Lauren Featured in the Atlanta Journal Constitution!
Picky eaters propel ‘mompreneurs’ to the top of baby food industry
By Nedra Rhone | Read the original in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution here.
Got a picky eater at home? Welcome to the club. It’s not exclusive.
But for several locals, a desire to solve the picky eating conundrum has earned them a spot in the ever growing market of parent-created organic baby food brands.“I have three picky eaters, but Jack is my youngest one,” said Heather Schoenrock, founder of Roswell-based Jack’s Harvest, a line of frozen organic baby food. Schoenrock had been making baby food for years when a friend noticed that the pureed peas Schoenrock was feeding Jack looked so fresh and bright. Schoenrock began sharing her freezer full of purees with friends who told her they would pay for more. In 2006, a business was born.
Today, Jack’s Harvest is one of at least three organic baby food companies with roots in the metro area, all of which evolved in part to satisfy picky pint-sized eaters. Agatha Achindu, a Woodstock-based mom, launched Yummy Spoonfuls, another brand of frozen organic baby food, in 2006. And NurturMe, a line of dried organic baby food co-founded by Atlanta-raised Lauren McCullough and her partner Caroline Freedman, hit store shelves in 2010.
Competition is increasingly fierce in the organic baby food segment, which has grown about 60 percent over the last five years, said Elizabeth Pantley, author of “The No-Cry Picky Eater Solution,” (McGraw Hill, $17). In 2012, global sales are expected to reach $2.26 billion, according to estimates from Innovative Research and Products.
Why all the hoopla about organic baby food?
“The average person is becoming more health conscious,” Pantley said. Not just about organic foods, but also issues of childhood obesity and illnesses. Parents want to start their babies off right, she said, and if time doesn’t permit them to make their own baby food, ready-made organic baby foods fills the gap. When there is a picky eater involved, and there usually is, organic foods can make the road to healthy eating a bit easier.
“Organic foods are more colorful, bright and have richer flavors. They look fresher and are more enticing,” Pantley said. “Food that is colorful is more appealing to [children].” Parents also may play a role. “A parent’s attitude is a critical factor to how picky a child is,” Pantley said. “The better a parent feels about what they are feeding the baby, the more positive their approach.”
Achindu, of Yummy Spoonfuls, can attest to the transformation in a child’s eating habits when a parent’s attitude changes. Moving to the area 21 years ago from her native Cameroon, she was appalled to see people eating food from a can. She made it her mission to teach adults how to eat better, but when she became a mother, her efforts shifted to children. She became the go-to-source for moms with finicky eaters. Read the rest of this entry »
The Ziering Family Celebrates Halloween with NurturMe
Ian Ziering Celebrates Mia’s First Halloween
Read the original post on Celebrity Baby Scoop here.
Ian Ziering and his wife Erin are gearing up for baby’s first Halloween! We spotted the happy couple – along with their adorable 6-month-old daughter Mia - at the pumpkin patch earlier this month.
And last Saturday (October 22), the Zierings hosted Mia’s first Halloween party at their Los Angeles home. Each pint-sized guest received a nutritious gift pack from NurturMe with pumpkin/squash baby food. The new parents opened up to Celebrity Baby Scoop about their festive party: “We had 16 babies between the ages of 6 months to 9 months and one toddler and their parents.” Read the rest of this entry »
Pregnancy Blog: Baby Eleanor Arrives!
The most exciting thing about Eleanor’s birth was not knowing whether she was an Elle or a Peter. We had opted not to find out in advance, and it wasn’t until she made her beautiful debut that I realized how anxiety-producing the not-knowing had been.
I can relax now knowing, for example, that she’s (at least so far) a mild mannered, sweet girl like her big sister Audrey. Not the rambunctious Freedman boy I had been imagining (and, I can now admit, fearing). I now know that we can reuse all of Audrey’s clothes, shoes and gear. And that our girls, Audrey & Eleanor, can and will most likely share a bedroom. So, all our non-preparing and rearranging, in the end, worked out just fine.
I also know that all the signs & myths we’d come to believe about predicting the baby’s gender turned out to be just that, myths. The clairvoyant-seeming Hispanic woman who spotted me half an aisle away at Randall’s and approached to inform me that I’d be having a boy. The technician we thought had goofed by calling the baby a “him” during our 24-week ultrasound. The theories about basketball bellies and broadened noses – all supposed indicators of males. The fact that Joey’s father and brother had established a girl-boy-girl-boy birthing pattern, which we assumed meant that Joey would follow suit. All those things had, over time, convinced us that our Numero Dos was indeed a Peter. Turns out, we were in for a big surprise – as we had hoped – when we opted to not find out the sex in the first place.
But let me back up. Before we headed into the OR and learned of Eleanor’s gender, I was dealing with some nerves back in the pre-op waiting room. Joey and I arrived at the hospital in the early morning darkness. After quickly processing paperwork , we headed to the pre-op area where mini-bedrooms outfitted with IV trees, machines and monitors were partitioned by 3-sided curtains. There was a lot coming at me, lots to digest and adjust to. And somehow, despite my having nine-plus months to consider it all, the last weeks of my pregnancy snuck up on me and all of a sudden, it was go time, and I felt I hadn’t had sufficient time to process everything. I decided to deal with things in waves – the first wave being my surgery, which scared me a little. Next would be the baby’s arrival – girl or boy, healthy or not, fussy or easy, etc, etc. Then, there was Audrey and her adjustment. And finally, the thought of work and how to fit it back into the mix, with the new (fussy? easy? healthy?) baby and its (well-adjusted? jealous?) older sister both demanding my attention. Yes, take it in waves – it was the only way to ride out this overwhelming experience.
After an hour and a half delay, we were finally summoned to go meet our family’s newest member. I walked back to the OR, which already differentiated this experience from my first c-section. That time, I was wheeled down the hallway on a stretcher, anxiously counting the rectangular fluorescent lights as they ticked by overhead. This time, I entered the room and immediately took stock of the whiteness of the lights, the quietness of the personnel in the room, the fact that I was casually walking in to have my middle cut open and my baby extracted in mere moments. Read the rest of this entry »
Austin Kidbits
Read the original post from 9/14 here.
Let’s face it; both your itty bitty mini skirt and your dreams for your pre-baby bra size deserve the same mantra: Let it go.
To lighten the load even more, check out NurturMe’s locally developed, innovative line of baby food. The 100% organic fruits and veggies are quick-dried into a powdered mixture to preserve the maximum amount of nutrition per portion and then sealed into a flat, single-serving pouch. Just add water or breast milk, stir and serve. Each serving weighs less than half an ounce, making it perfect for stashing in your diaper bag, purse or hubby’s pocket.
Because who needs added baggage?
Available locally at Whole Foods, Central Market and Target.