Starting this Valentine’s Day, we will begin donating one 18-serving variety pack to Feed the Children for every one purchased on our website. The goal of our Open Your Hearts, Nurtur For Nutrition campaign is to provide American children with over 100,000 meals over the next six months.

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. By then, I’d accumulated a cooler-full of milk in little Ziploc storage bags. I’d also gotten windburned by the Chicago chill, grilled by a hard-nosed retail buyer, and hustled through airport security not once but twice in one day.  When I found that mirage-like “Special Assistance” restroom sign at the airport, prior to my returning flight, I couldn’t wait to dump my collection of bags on the floor and give my tired body some reprieve. I reassembled all the parts to the breast pump for the third time that day, and began pumping.

In the years since I used this pump with my daughter Audrey, they’d made a change to the storage bags: now instead of a taping mechanism, the bags attach to a new component that hooks onto the pump. Refusing to buy yet another piece of equipment (even a silly, small plastic component), I stubbornly stuck a roll of Scotch tape in my pump bag and decided it would do the job. Well, after pumping two enormous bags of “liquid gold”, as breast milk is affectionately (and appropriately) called by many, one of the bags grew too heavy for my jury-rigging and loosed itself from the Scotch tape. It fell as if in slow-motion, about 6 ounces of breastmilk, all over the floor of Chicago O’Hare. I nearly cried.

But instead, I wiped the smug smile off my face from earlier in the day and accepted the fact that working motherhood is hard. Take an already challenging career and add to it extra pre-planning, organization, and endless gear. But in the end, all of it is worth it. Not least of all breastfeeding.

What I’ve come to love about nursing – now that the leaking, Lansinoh, and cold pack days are long behind me (you moms know what I’m talking about) – is that it affords me the opportunity to Slow. Down. There are few things more ridiculous, for example, than trying to eat a meal, one-handedly, while nursing a child. It inevitably leads to globs of some condiment or another on the nursing babe’s cheek and an impolite trail of crumbs on her soft spot. And typing while nursing – more like, pecking with one hand and backspacing every third key – is terribly inefficient. While nursing, a mom is forced to do nothing other than stop, slow down and focus in on the growing, ever-changing child at her breast. Except for when I breastfeed, I personally don’t get enough time during my day to sit around and stare at my little one’s fingernails. To notice how long her eyelashes are getting. To discover, yikes, I need to bathe those neck rolls more thoroughly next time!

These meditative, endearing moments with my daughter in between other, more hectic and distracted moments during my day, have not only given me an appreciation for the breastfeeding experience – but, strung together, they’ve become the backbone of the intrinsic bond that has grown between me and Elle in the early weeks of her life. And for that, I am grateful. And, I’ll press on, despite business trips, endless to-do lists, and everything else, and will continue to breastfeed my daughter in the hopes of continuing to strengthen that bond with each passing day.

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.

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.

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.

At workshops, she taught moms how to make baby food, but they still asked her to make it. One day while preparing orders for about 300 moms, her subdivision was overrun with cars and the doorbell kept ringing, so her husband suggested she might consider starting a business.

Yummy Spoonfuls comes in three stages — Creamy Yummy,  Mushy Yummy and Chunky Yummy. In 2009, the brand won first place in Cookie Magazine’s baby food taste test, while placement in stores such as Whole Foods and Dean & Deluca helped the company grow. This past June, sales had doubled the 2010 total, Achindu said.

Despite the success of her company, Achindu still teaches moms. “People say, I can’t believe that you sell baby food and you still teach people how to make baby food,” Achindu said. “It is not just a company. It is a mission in America to change how we see food.”

The biggest issue historically with organic food (for baby and adults) has been the cost, Pantley said. Organic baby food runs a few more cents per ounce than traditional baby food, but the hope is that as the industry grows, the cost will go down. Already, niche markets for organic baby food have emerged.

In 2010, McCullough and Freedman launched NurturMe in Whole Foods stores across Texas.

The duo located organic farms with the equipment to freeze dry or drum dry the foods — processes that help retain nutrients, phytochemicals, flavor and freshness. Moms only need to add liquid to turn the six dried flavors into infant meals. Though distribution and recognition have continued to grow, it was input from moms that had the biggest impact on the company.

“We did a focus group recently where 80 percent said they would use NurturMe for infants, but 100 percent said they would use it to get their kids to eat veggies. That is where parents are struggling,” said McCullough, who discovered  that parents were mixing pouches of NurturMe to yogurt, macaroni and cheese or even restaurant meals to make sure their picky eaters were getting the proper nutrition.

The company has since re-positioned itself as a brand of organic baby food that grows with your baby from infancy to age four. And based on one user’s story, the product may have broader appeal in the future.

One happy customer “was cooking for her husband and couldn’t find a vegetable in the house,” McCullough said. So she pulled out a package of NurturMe peas, made a puree for her husband and he lapped it right up.

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.”

It sounds like the party was a spook-tacular good time!

Everyone came in costume,” the Zierings said. “We had a pumpkin decorating station, a musical sing-a-long with Sara from World Citizen. Baby and NurturMe donated the gift bags with pumpkin/squash baby food in them and little gifts for the babies.”

Mia got into the festive spirit…thanks to the yummy goodies! “I think getting to eat the pumpkin baby food was Mia’s favorite part of the day,” the proud new parents said.

The couple invited “friends in the Hollywood area with babies close to Mia’s age and from our Mommy and Me group.”

And it sounds like there were some creative costumes at the afternoon shindig.

We had 17 couples with babies at our party,” Erin told us. “Ian dressed as Link from Zelda while Mia and myself were his fairy companions. We had a couple come as the Ghostbusters and their baby as a ghost. We had the Flinstones with Pebbles and Bam Bam. We had Peter Pan, Hook and Tinkerbell as a family. We had a mom and baby come as bumble bees and the daddy as a bee keeper. My favorite costume was a mom dressed up as ‘wasabi mommy’ and the baby as a piece of sushi.”

While the parents had a great time with each other, the babies also bonded at the fun party. “We can definitely see some ‘baby friendships’ developing,” the Zierings said. “It is interesting to see them gravitate towards each other and watch each other play.”

What are the Zierings’ plans this Halloween?

Our plans for Halloween is to visit with our neighbors, put Mia to bed by her bedtime (7 p.m.) and have some mommy/daddy time over dinner in the kitchen.”

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.

Soon, things got underway. Joey held my arm while carrying on a conversation with the doctor about his family – his two kids at SMU, one on the football roster – pieces of which were difficult to overhear with the heating machine near my body. Within minutes, the doctor told Joey to get ready to “make the call” and as he lifted Eleanor’s body from mine, the nurse held two hands over her midsection to delay the surprise a moment longer. When she parted her hands, Joey sighed a laugh and announced tearfully, it’s a girl.  I remember looking up at him busily taking photos – even getting reprimanded for leaning over the sterile barrier – while the news sunk in that our family of four included us and our two, dear daughters. I immediately began crying and couldn’t stop for the rest of my time in the OR. Eleanor, too, was crying – a small, cat-like sound – from the minute she had emerged.

A girl. Another girl. Imagining this moment – specifically, Joey announcing “a girl” – plagued me during my pregnancy, since I feared he (and maybe even both of us) would be disappointed to learn that it was another girl and not a boy, our Peter. Instead, there was absolutely no feelings of negativity at all – just pure gratitude, joy, hope, anticipation – all the lovely feelings that a new baby brings with it into the world.  I honestly remember thinking – this is that feeling my Aunt Doreen was talking about – I could have been getting a heart transplant instead of a c-section on the other side of that blue curtain! I was that overwhelmed – overflowing – with love for our new daughter.

While rearranging my ideas & expectations about our family in my head, I was shown my first view of Eleanor from above the operating curtain. I was prepared to have the same reaction I’d had to seeing Audrey for the first time: who is this stranger? Instead, I just remember thinking how beautiful she looked – perfectly pink, proportionate, and healthy.  After cleaning, weighing and checking her, the nurses delivered her in a swaddled cocoon and allowed me and Joey to spend a nice, long moment with her. After a while, Joey was summoned to take her to the nursery while I completed my operation. This was when I learned that he’d be delivering the news to my parents and showing Eleanor to Audrey for the first time. I hadn’t realized I’d miss out on all that, and felt a pang of disappointment and jealousy. On his way out, I instructed him, remember everything! Which the doctor repeated poignantly, remember everything.

Our time at the hospital was less blissful than I’d remembered Audrey’s early days as being. Mostly because those subsequent “waves” started coming ashore: handling Audrey with kid gloves, ensuring she felt included in the whole experience along with us and understood what was going on. Not making her feel marginalized but also not letting her touch the baby or the countless buttons in my post-partem room. Also, I was anxious to field emails and get online and, I guess, prove to myself that “plugging back in” wouldn’t be that difficult to do.

Now a few weeks into Eleanor’s life, the adjustment is ongoing. We are all changed by her arrival, learning to make room in our home and our hearts for our family’s newest member. She is fitting in beautifully and easily, but is also reshaping our days, and gradually our lives, with an imprint all her own. These days are precious – each one revealing a new facial expression, a new sound, a new discovery about our little Elle. These days are also fleeting, I now know, so despite the veil of sleepiness that shrouds them, I am trying my best to remember everything.

~

Thank you for sharing in my pregnancy journey and for all your support along the way! We will continue to use this blog to provide updates on the business, new product launches, exciting press & product reviews; I’ll also, from time to time, continue to share my experiences as a mom & business owner. We hope you’ll follow along and join in on the discussion!