Category: It takes a village

Mama Maker: Cameca, Savoring the Time to Refine Your Craft

Posted in Career, Family time, It takes a village, Mompreneur, working momTagged , , , Leave a comment

Cameca Bacchus doesn’t shy away from reinvention, having toggled between corporate roles, baking and motherhood. She takes inspiration from women like Sylvia Weinstock who achieved success much later in life.

“I can crunch numbers well, but my passion really is baking,” she says.

“When the subprime crisis happened, I remember walking to my office one day and seeing people leaving with all their stuff at the time, losing their jobs left and right,” she recalls. “I said, ‘it might be a matter of time before I’m one of those people, so maybe I should figure out what I really enjoy instead of what I just do well.’”

One week later, she filled out an application for culinary school, and then nine months later left her corporate finance job, and began classes while working for a catering company. Things changed again when she started her family.

“The thing with working at bakeries, is that you start really early, like, I was working a shift from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. but not being around in the mornings is what’s tricky,” she says. “You also would work on the weekends, so that was another point of losing Saturdays and Sundays–when can we ever have a day when we’re all home together–because you just don’t get to replace that time.”

Now Cameca approaches baking as a part-time passion, one cake at a time. Her goal is to grow Creations by Cameca at a gradual pace as her kids get older and more independent. Meanwhile, she is back in a corporate role and also has time to support causes like Behind the Book as a board member, which is hosting its Book Bash fundraiser on June 19 in Washington Heights to give 3,000 books to young people in the neighborhood.

“The biggest goal I have now is to continue to just refine my craft,” she says. “I have a two year old, and I still want to be able to enjoy that season of her life, so I don’t necessarily want to sacrifice the key parts of the day for baking at this point.”

As any mother who juggles a corporate job and young kids can attest, there isn’t a lot of energy left at the end of the day. That’s precisely when Cameca heads into the kitchen.

“Baking has always been something that I find reduces my stress,” she says. “The key is just that I can take my time and really give it the deliberate, intentional devotion it needs. It’s because I enjoy it, it gives me a sense of calm, so even though I’m doing it at the end of the day, I know I’m the only one in my kitchen and I can take my time.”

Cameca encourages fellow moms to focus on the long game and not put pressure on ourselves to achieve milestones at the pace we were once accustomed to, and to be “okay with things not happening in the exact time frame that you wanted.”

“You can take your time and you can really let yourself grow in stages,” she says. “So that when you do land on the top, you can stay there.”

And for those moments when you’re feeling overwhelmed or questioning yourself and your choices?

“Remember your reason why you’re even pushing for this in the first place,” she says. “Where you might be right in that moment is not where your story’s going to end. That’s just one point where you are and your story is still being written.”

Cameca sees burnout as a sign that it’s time to reevaluate and make changes, pointing to the critical need of a support system when you’re “taking any leap.”

“Who’s going to help catch you?” she says. “You can’t have it all without support. It’s just impossible to do by yourself.”

Cameca seeks support from her husband, her mom and friends when she needs an extra set of hands or hours outside of her late night baking sessions. And her kids will pitch in, especially for a taste test.

“They definitely have an appreciation for it and so I do hope, at some point, they can see that ‘hey, mommy’s a business owner,’ like this is something that people can do,” she says. “You can own a business and run a business, so that’s important for them to know.”

“Someday, I do want to have a bakery where they can run in and be like, ‘mom, let me help you.’ That’s my goal.”

Mama Shaker: Abigail, Accepting the Risks of Change

Posted in Career, Grief, It takes a village, Pregnancy, working mom, Workplace cultureTagged , , , , Leave a comment

While the world was in quarantine, Abigail Nawrocki worked 12-hour shifts with her team to keep online orders humming, moved across the country, and had a baby.

“When everything shut down last year, everybody started ordering more from home and relying on more distribution companies to get them the goods that they wanted,” she says.

“In the beginning it was scary because we were all still going to work and there were so many unknowns with COVID, but I think now everybody’s got really good corporate policies around it, there’s a lot of structure and safety so we’re just enjoying it and riding the wave.”

Abigail’s ability to embrace fear is at the core of how she manages the logistics of growing her family and her team.

“I think that’s just how I’ve always lived my life, and what I role model for my kids as well, so that they have similar tendencies,” she says. “It’s okay to take the risk, and even if you fail it’s not that big of a deal.”

Originally hailing from Chicago, Abigail moved from Indiana to Los Angeles after graduation—and as of last year, now calls Nashville home with her husband and four kids.

“It’s always been a natural state for me, taking risks and really just seeing the return on investment from that,” she says. “My parents have always encouraged me to get out there on my own and make things happen for myself.”

After finding out she was pregnant a few weeks before lockdown, Abigail experienced the contrast of a socially-distanced pregnancy without the common courtesy of someone offering their seat or a helping hand.

“You lose that cultural aspect of being pregnant and having everybody in amazement of you in public so that kind of sucks,” she says, noting there are pros and cons.

“It was just me and my husband and no one else was allowed in the hospital and we got that time together to bond and to bond with the baby,” she says. “But it also was a lot of pressure to leave the hospital right away. Normally with a C-section, I would be in recovery for three or four days. I left in 40 hours after this one.”

Now that Abigail has a “pandemic baby who’s not used to being in group settings” she’s seeing how new situations affect everyone differently.

“There’s been so much change in the last year and that’s really what’s difficult for people,” she says. “It’s not necessarily the isolation or the environment that they’re in, but it’s the change right?”

“Look for your village,” she says. “When you have those people around you supporting you, or even just there to talk and listen, it takes so much of the mental load off and allows you to get back into a good space.”

Abigail enjoys connecting with other moms, whether it’s outdoors at the park or virtually in groups like HeyMama.

“It’s very hard for humans who are habitual creatures to accept change and so having that community and being able to talk to them and go through the change together really helps,” she says.

Mama Maker: Lesley, Creating the Space for Women to Feel Supported

Posted in Family time, Giving back, It takes a village, Mompreneur, Pregnancy, Spirituality, Work from home, working momTagged , , , , Leave a comment

Every day Lesley Osei answers the call to help others, beyond her five children under four and her six siblings, across fifteen acres where she and her husband are building a church in Connecticut, with the thousands of followers she motivates on Instagram, all the way to Ghana where she’s bringing basic comforts to rural mothers-to-be.

“We actually stumbled upon a village where you can’t even take a car or bus there,” she recalls. “Once a month, they have to go and fetch water–it’s like a big thing–and so what we’re doing now is we’re getting developers to go and dig a well so that it will be easier access for water for them.”

After making progress with four wells, Lesley felt compelled to do more—especially after a group of husbands expressed what it was like to watch their wives suffering through labor and delivery in the elements.

“What we are creating are maternity pods where they can actually go and at least have a midwife there coach them through, be there with them, where they can lay on the bed–because a lot of them are squatting in the middle of their houses to give birth.”

It’s not the first time that Lesley has extended her arms out to fellow mothers. While counseling couples at church, she’s discovered that education and support is needed across the full spectrum of pregnancy and postpartum, which inspired her to start Moms Algorithm as a hub for “systems and processes” to support moms.

“I realized that a lot of people didn’t know things like folic acid was something that you should be taking, even before, to make sure you get your body right,” she says.

“I truly believe the Lord gave me a lot of kids just so I can get it done and teach people how to get it done and shifting your mind is very important to me. I am the the third of seven, and so my siblings are always calling me for advice, always in some type of emergency situation.”

Lesley makes it a priority to be present with her kids through all of her endeavors, and often wakes up before dawn to put her ideas on paper. For her latest project, she’s drawing inspiration from the experiences of her 3-year-old daughter.

“She loves princesses and anytime I’m trying to find her a black princess they don’t have any,” she says. “So what the Lord laid on my heart to do is to create my own and so that’s what I’ve been doing recently—trying to get all the different things and items and products that children normally use, and get characters that are biracial, that are African American, that have white friends, that have black friends and just trying to get more mixture into what they see.”

Lesley’s aspirations to support young girls and women all around the world are fueled by the care and attention she receives from her mother and husband.

“He always maintains time for me and when he sees that I’m withdrawn or quiet, he stops whatever he’s doing,” she says. “He doesn’t care who is around—he literally stops and has a conversation with me, which I always appreciate.”

The solid foundation of their faith-based family has stemmed into a global network of giving back.

Mama Maker: Lisa, Growing Stronger with Grief

Posted in Depression, Grief, It takes a village, Mom guilt, Mompreneur, postpartum, PregnancyTagged , , , Leave a comment

Lisa Herrington emerged from the most unfathomable experience a parent can have by choosing connection over confinement, ultimately helping others do the same.

“I was pretty quiet for like those first six or seven months because I didn’t know if I was going to survive it,” she says. “You suddenly feel like you’re completely alone and nobody understands what you’re going through, and I was so scared of the emotions that I was feeling.”

The life that Lisa and her husband had envisioned before they went to the hospital to deliver twins looked tragically different as they cradled one of their babies for the last time and left the other in the care of the NICU for six weeks.

“I couldn’t really separate the grief and the postpartum,” she says. “I had a child that was also living through this with me and I think that’s what changed it for me; this moment of ‘this is his story too’ and this story cannot end sad. It’s going to take a lot to fight out of this, but he’s worth it. My family’s worth it.”

Walking into a room filled with parents and a vivacious moderator who had been through similar experiences gave Lisa the courage to step out of her solitude.

“I remember thinking that things happen to good people—we’re all good people in here,” she realized in that moment. “I saw this person who had climbed out of a place where I was. I was like, I’m going to get there.”

And get there she did. Lisa went on to moderate the group and comfort parents in the NICU.

“You probably want to punch me in the face right now and that’s okay,” she would tell them. “You can be mad. I understand there might be a time months or years down the road where you’ll appreciate knowing that you’re not alone in this.”

Lisa was also determined to strengthen her marriage in therapy after reading that 80 percent of couples who lose a child don’t make it.

“Grief can sometimes be selfish where it’s all about you, it’s all about your feelings, all about your emotions and how sad you are and how life is so unfair,” she says.

With the combination of exercise, therapy and anti-depressants, she was able to “stop this wheel turning in my head of the guilt” and continue her “self exploration of what worked in terms of surviving grief as hard as I was grieving.”

Lisa finally reached a point where she was able to reconnect with people outside of her circle of grieving parents, and close friends and family.

“I think the hardest part in the beginning is the loneliness and that’s sort of a catch-22 because you also need that space,” she says. “I am a huge extrovert. I was just too nervous about what I was feeling to have a lot of people in our life.”

She also returned to her fitness studio, FIT House Davis even though she would “leave sobbing” at first, overwhelmed with memories of being pregnant.

“You have to just know that the first time you do things after a loss—any type of loss—they’re going to feel a lot different than they did before the loss,” she says. “You’re going to feel very vulnerable and that’s where you have to make this decision of ‘I’m going to sit in those feelings and I’m going to work through those feelings,’ because it’s worth it to me that this stays in my life.”

Over the course of the last 8 years, Lisa’s family grew by two more boys and a girl, all of which help keep the memory of Brady alive.

“A lot of people said to me, ‘I’m so surprised you got pregnant again so fast. Weren’t you scared?’ Yeah, of course, I was so scared,” she says. “If you live in the negativity of ‘bad things are going to happen,’ that is not living.”

“Finding the joy in every single day knowing that we’re not necessarily guaranteed tomorrow, or really appreciating the good when it’s happening instead of fearing what may happen, that’s where I found this balance in between the joy and the grief, being present and focusing on the good, and knowing that the sad will always be a part of our lives.”

She started to share her experience in social media, before it became more commonplace on Instagram, or more recently by Chrissy Teigen on Medium and Meghan Markle in the New York Times.

“When tough situations happen in life, it’s okay to be mad, it’s okay to cry, it’s okay to be sad,” she says. “But you also have to find the joy in the situation and the appreciation of there’s a future ahead of us, always. No matter how bad it feels, there’s guaranteed good in the future as long as you choose to move forward.”

This fall, Lisa published her first book, Your Amazing Itty Bitty® Grief Book: 15 Chapters on How to Support Family and Friends on Their Journey, inspired by the conversations she’s had with her kids or those looking for guidance.

“I never thought I’d feel comfortable in the chapter that included losing a child but I do,” says Lisa. “Sometimes you have to go through some really tough stuff to find some of the beautiful things in your life that you may not have had, including a perspective that’s completely different.”

“I feel like I had an open wound and it’s always going to be a wound, but it’s much softer now,” she says.

“And I know we survived it. And now we share our story in hopes it will help others realize life still holds so much beauty after loss.”

Mama Maker: Viola, Drawing Us Towards Happiness No Matter What Happens

Posted in Anxiety, Family time, Giving back, It takes a village, Self-care, Work from home, working momTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

Viola Sutanto found joy within the four walls of a hospital room where her 9-year-old daughter awaited a bone marrow transplant for aplastic anemia, ultimately defying the odds of a match with her 3-year-old brother.

“They had told us of course we’ll test your son, but just know that sibling matches are a 25% chance, so don’t hold your breath,” Viola recalls her doctors saying at the time. “So when we heard that he was a perfect match, we couldn’t believe it. It was such a miracle.”

Now Viola wants to pay her gratitude forward by publishing Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness in partnership with The Collective Book Studio and will give a portion of proceeds back to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. She’s been amazed at the response to her iFundWomen crowdfunding campaign, which has reached all the way to her hometown in Singapore.

“I was really very touched and overwhelmed,” she says. “In the first 24 hours of the campaign, we had raised thousands of dollars. Longtime friends of mine, people in our community and even friends I hadn’t heard from in years—suddenly I’m getting texts and messages from them saying, ‘I cannot believe you went through this’ and ‘here you go, I want 10 copies of your book.’”

Sharing Her Story

“I’ve been pretty isolated for more than a year since Maika was diagnosed, and I’m a very introverted person so I tend to hold it all in,” Viola says. “I realized, gosh, I’ve never even told most of these people what had happened.”

The inspiration for Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness began when Viola and her daughter came up with sketchbooks as a way to keep themselves occupied during the hospital stay. The “100 days” creative movement had also recently gained popularity.

“So that’s when the drawings started happening,” she said. “We’d pick one thing to draw and it could be just the most mundane thing in the world. I think my first drawing was actually a dinner at the hospital or something silly like that— but over time it just became something fun for us to do.”

Viola started posting the drawings on Instagram and as a former book designer, she naturally began to imagine them taking shape in page form.

“What happened last year made me realize, as a family, how much resilience we have,” she says. “I’m a more optimistic person now than I ever was before, and also very mindful of being grateful for everything that we have.”

Because Maika was immunocompromised following her treatment, Viola’s family entered another year of social distancing and mask-wearing with plenty of practice and perspective.

“I think it really helps to find the silver lining in everything and every day,” she says. “Being able to see that on the upside, while stuck at home I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, which I love. I have the privilege of working from home—some people don’t. There’s just so many things to be grateful for despite everything else that’s happening.”

Viola’s perseverance has helped her carry her sustainable bag and home goods business through the abrupt changes that came earlier this year.

“Our wholesale business plummeted between March and now,” she says. “It’s still very much in recovery mode and that was a real bummer because we had started off the year strong. Every day we’d pick up the phone and get order cancellations and postponements. It was really devastating because most of our accounts are mom and pop stores, or they’re small businesses like mine. We have real relationships with these people and worked with them for years.”

She stays grounded by centering herself with meditation and journaling, before jumping into full days of distance learning and running her now booming e-commerce business. It’s a practice that helped Viola get through her darkest days.

“The only other person who was really in the thick of it with me is my husband and that’s all we talked about,” she says. “Sometimes I just don’t want to talk. I felt like my journal and my meditation practice was my own thing that I could do solo, without having to worry about how everyone else is feeling. And that felt sacred to me.”

No matter what life throws your way, Viola recommends giving yourself a break, taking it one step at a time and focusing on the small things you can start with.

“Try to find the silver lining somewhere,” she says. “There’s going to be light at the end of the tunnel, even if it’s a super long tunnel and these days of not seeing where it’s going to end. But I do believe it will be there.”

“If you just take the time to notice, there’s always something, some small joy to be found.”

Mama Maker: Sarah, Deciding How We Want to Live

Posted in Couple time, Family time, Giving back, It takes a village, Mompreneur, Pregnancy, Self-care, working momTagged , , , , Leave a comment

Sarah Kelly’s rebound from a breast cancer diagnosis at 32 weeks pregnant to building a clean beauty brand featured by the likes of Good Morning America, exemplifies what “salty” women are capable of.

“I was up in Maine at my parents’ house and my sisters were there and it was one of those moments that you’ll never forget,” she says about the dreaded phone call that no one ever expects.

Just 72 hours earlier at a routine prenatal checkup, Sarah mentioned the lump she’d recently found to her OB-GYN, at the encouragement of her sister Leah, an oncology nurse who’s now her business partner. That Tuesday appointment led to an ultrasound on Wednesday, followed by a biopsy on Thursday and confirmation on Friday that it was indeed stage 3, triple-negative breast cancer.

“They wanted to start chemo right away, and it was too big for surgical removal,” she says. “The first cancer treatment that you do, you can receive while you’re pregnant. So I started two rounds of chemo and then they induced me at 38 weeks.”

What Sarah calls her “warrior week” started with the birth of her daughter, followed by blood transfusions two days later, and her third round of chemo two days after that.

“It’s just amazing; I always say, your body can handle so much,” she says. “You just have to have the right mindset.”

Sarah also credits the support she had during treatment, especially while she and her husband were between houses and living with her in-laws. She points out that her 14-month-old and newborn were in incredibly capable hands with her mother-in-law, a neonatal nurse.

“Cancer sucked, but it also gave me perspective on how I wanted to live,” she says.

“I think I was checking the boxes—half of them were making me happy and the other half were creating a lot of toxicity,” says Sarah about life back in Boston, which involved battling traffic to and from work, taking time away from her kids.

The idea of starting a business with her sister Leah entered the equation, inspired by the emerging interest in green beauty and a lifelong dream to build her own brand after working in sales and corporate marketing.

“Having lost my hair and everything, putting on a lipstick really empowered me to feel a little bit more feminine throughout my journey,” says Sarah. “That’s the direction we decided to go in and then it just evolved, talking about how we take care of ourselves, eliminating stress in our lives.”

Salty Girl Beauty took a minimalistic approach to cosmetics and body care, made locally in small batches using organic coastal ingredients. The name is a double entendre, honoring the resilience of women.

“What we were going through at that time in our lives, you needed a lot of grit and sass and attitude,” she says. “I think women feel that throughout the day they need to have that armor—whether you’re going through amazing things or a really hard time in your life.”

Sarah noticed that while she was getting a lot of attention during her treatment, finding ways for her husband to feel supported too was critical. So she, Leah and their siblings started Foundation4Love as a non-profit arm of the brand to carve out quality time with caregivers.

“Making sure that we were staying connected was really important to me, and so people would come over and watch the kids while we could go out to dinner,” Sarah says. “So that’s kind of the thing we do with other people going through this. Who’s their number one, is it their family or is it a sister, a husband? We try to do something that allows them to disconnect from their cancer and connect with whatever is love in their life.”

Through the spirit of partnership they’re also funding the cold cap program at New England Cancer Specialists, running workshops with Mount Sinai, and even spun up a new kind of cancer wellness retreat called Warrior Revolution—together with Cynthia Besteman, the cancer survivor behind Violets are Blue Skincare.

“There are so many conferences around the medical side and the treatment side but we really wanted to focus on, ‘yes, you’re going through cancer, but how do you live through that?'” she says about the full-day events which covered a range of wellness, intimacy and mental health topics and ended with a pajama party.

“At the last retreat, we had about six stage IV 30-40 year-old women they didn’t know in our own community,” she says. “And now they’re best friends. Being able to create those connections has been really great.”

While 2020 brought a lot of uncertainty for Sarah, Leah and their team through the spring and summer months, things took a very exciting turn when the opportunity to be featured on Good Morning America popped up.

“Getting that national exposure has been life-saving,” she says. “It’s been literally the biggest whirlwind ever. To see how the four of us, as well our greater community, helped and pitched in so that everything came together for it was just really, really special.”

Coming together, whether it’s as “Salty Girls” or as a family has given Leah the life she reimagined for herself five years ago.

“As much as I probably work too much, it’s on my own terms and I can do it in the living room while my kids are around,” she says. “I’m very present and we’re able to do the things that they want to participate in and spend a lot more time outdoors and all of the things that I think create a happy house.”

While that often means Sarah has a six-, five- and two-and-a-half year old clinging to her while trying to put makeup on, she still believes in the importance of self-care “without it being a big production.”

“Being able to have that message to talk to women about taking care of themselves and not putting themselves last,” is what fuels her.

“Because when you’re healthy, everyone else around you can be healthy,” she says.

Mama Maker: Angela, Creating Our Own Story

Posted in Career, Giving back, It takes a village, Mompreneur, Work from home, working momTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Angela Engel flips right past the “why me?” question that many stumble over when the opportunity to make a difference presents itself. The mother of three is a publishing industry disruptor by day, who mobilized the creation of PPE at the start of the pandemic–while continuing to lead the San Francisco chapter of Hey Mama, support social causes, and navigate distance learning.

Her response when people ask how she raised $30,000 and distributed 10,000 face shields across the country—including Children’s Hospital Minnesota, Alameda Health Consortium and Navajo Nation clinics in Arizona and New Mexico— says everything about her willingness to spring into action.

“When this all hit and I saw my best friend literally in the ER when the Princess Cruise landed and he was working night shifts and lost it when he couldn’t get a face shield, I was like, ‘who else is going to save him?’”

“I think that same spirit is the greatest thing you learn when you’re an entrepreneur,” she says. “That fire, that spirit, that idea…what’s the worst that could happen? Someone says no, right? That’s not a big deal.”

Angela felt a similar call to action when she was “really pregnant” with her third daughter and had grown weary of publishing industry trade shows where she struggled to find a humane place to pump in concrete convention centers.

She dabbled in children’s apparel for a while, which was more kid-friendly and introduced her to the faster pace of retail.

“I would bring the baby with me and put her in the stroller and that was great, but I missed publishing,” she says. “It’s the creative piece.”

While doing business development for an independent publishing house in Petaluma, Angela “noticed the surge of self publishing” that was more akin to the speed of fashion than the traditional publishing industry.

“Why are we letting Amazon and self publishing take that market share?” she realized. “Why not pull together my colleagues from traditional publishing who are fantastic, who are graphic designers, who are typesetters, who are editors and let’s form a collective? We can do this as good as any big house and we can do it fast.”

The Collective Book Studio was born in 2019 around the idea of “partnership publishing” which retains the authors’ creative control and has gained the attention of her industry peers for its disruptive business model.

“We don’t print on demand,” she says. “We really believe the book is an art form.”

One example is how the team packaged up a series of beautifully crafted pages from parenting coach (and Mama Shaker) Sue Groner in Parenting with Sanity & Joy: 101 Simple Strategies in a way that even the most exhausted among us can digest at our own pace.

“What is the message that you want your reader to take away?”

It’s the first question that Angela asks prospective authors (and something that anyone creating content should take the time to answer).

“That will help decide why are you writing this book,” she says.

For Maika handbag designer Viola Sutanto, it’s a reminder that even in our darkest days, happiness is all around us. She’s working with Angela and iFundWomen to fund Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness—inspired by Viola’s 9-year-old daughter’s hospital stay while she awaited a bone marrow transplant from her 3-year-old brother.

Whether our story involves putting an important message out into the world, or giving back in another way, taking action is the antidote to fear.

“I think the first step is to practice,” Angela says. “Write a sample chapter. Just write, even if it’s not good at all. It could literally be bullet points for all I care. But just get it down on paper.”

Mama Shaker: Tina, Empowering the Whole Family to Take Part

Posted in Childhood development, Giving back, It takes a village, Special needs, Time management, Work from home, working momTagged , , , Leave a comment

A set of color-coded cards plays a significant role in Tina Murray’s household, helping her teenage son track his daily routine while navigating distance learning with a visual impairment.

“I can just put those Kanbans next to his breakfast and he knows sometime throughout the day, ‘I’ve got to shower, I’ve got to go water my cucumbers,’ and later empty the dishwasher.”

“I think that COVID has actually gotten more kiddos involved in independent living skills,” she says.

While it can be tempting to speed through her son’s chores herself, Tina has learned to delegate out of necessity and to foster independence in the long run.

“He used to have an aide in the class that could help him locate the position in the notebook or the textbook that he needed to go to if he couldn’t get there as quickly as the teacher,” she says. “So that support is not physically close to him anymore; or, the vision teacher who’s teaching him how to cut safely because he’s down right where the knife is with his cucumber.”

The network of services and experts that Tina constructed for him over the years—thanks to the advice of fellow special-needs parents—has been reshuffled based on what’s available virtually and still funded amidst budget cuts.

Vista Center and its “expanded core curriculum that’s available to blind and visually impaired students” remains at the top of her list.

The 75-year-old Bay Area non-profit (which is currently running a back-to-school fundraiser to bridge the education gap created by remote learning) has empowered Tina and other families to think beyond the challenges posed by traditional sports and recreation to “push those boundaries a little bit,” she says.

“Let’s do kayaking, or maybe whitewater rafting. Let’s listen to a movie that is audio described as a group and enjoy that experience together.”

Tina says it’s “amazing to be a fly on the wall as a volunteer,” and it’s an opportunity for the parents to check in with each other.

“It’s pretty brilliant,” she says.

Tina also hosts the Vision Parents Google Group to continue the conversation.

“If my child is feeling successful, if my child is independent, if they are making their own dinner—hey, I am now in my ‘wow,’” Tina says about hitting a groove as a family. “It’s that progression towards independence in adulthood, given the state where we are. Those are my shining days.”

For those times when it “feels like one big long day” while blending school, work and everything else under one roof, she recommends reading Raising an Organized Child: 5 Steps to Boost Independence, Ease Frustration, and Promote Confidence by Dr. Damon Korb.

As a professional project manager and natural multitasker, Tina believes in “not trying to boil the ocean, not trying to solve everything at once, not taking on too much–because that is overwhelming.”

Instead, she suggests breaking up problems into manageable parts and celebrating the milestones along the way.

“It’s the opposite of low hanging fruit,” Tina says. “You have to pick the hardest things because that’s where you’re going to see the biggest gains.”

“You’re never done being a parent,” she says. “You’re never done figuring out how to connect with and relate to your child.”

“It has been a complete roller coaster to get to where we are, and I know there’s more coming,” she says about parenting in the teen years. “And I love roller coasters.”

When Our Presence Leads to Progress

Posted in Childhood development, Family time, It takes a village, Mom guiltTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

Leanne Sherred wants to reassure busy parents that the conversations we have with our children throughout the course of a day–even while negotiating meals and bedtime–are incredibly powerful for speech and language development.

“You can put language across every area of the day,” she says. “All those routines that are already going to happen in a very busy, crazy, hectic day–you’re still going to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, brush your teeth–all of those are opportunities for interacting with your kiddo, modeling language.”

It can be hard to recognize the silver lining of so much time together at home, but it’s presenting a unique opportunity for parental involvement.

“A lot of times when kids get speech therapy from school, parents barely have any idea what’s being worked on, or how it’s being addressed,” she says.

As the president and founder of Expressable, Leanne flipped the old model of speech therapy on its head. Instead of parents sitting in the waiting room while their kids meet with their therapist once a week, she and her husband launched a virtual option for families to participate together from home.

“One of my professors at Northwestern who taught early intervention made sure that if we walked away from our graduate career with anything in our minds it was that parent engagement is one of–if not the–most powerful tools that we have as clinicians,” she says.

Working directly with families is what led Leanne to choose speech therapy as a profession instead of becoming a dialect coach, after a childhood of easily picking up voices and accents.

“This realm where you’re having a huge impact on the lives of individuals and the lives of families spoke to me,” she says.

Even in this incredibly stressful season of parenthood, our children are changing and growing right before us. To the untrained eye, it can be hard to understand what’s going on behind the scenes to make all these milestones possible.

“As a therapist, I like to really think about the small wins,” she says, noting all of the skills that have to be in place before a word is even spoken. “They had to pay attention to you. They have to have memory for that. They have to have joint attention. They have to be turn-taking to an extent.”

It’s a reminder that all of this time we’re spending with our kids adds up. We may get frustrated, we may lose our patience, but the progress is there when we pause to recognize it.

“There’s nothing I love more than helping a parent use a strategy,” she says. “Then the kid says a word, or maybe for the first time ever puts two words together,” she says.

“It is really powerful for the parents to be the ones who made the success happen.”

Mama Shaker: Jess, Building Relationships Around Experiences We Share

Posted in Goals, It takes a village, Maternity leave, Mompreneur, postpartum, Pregnancy, Self-care, working momTagged , , , , Leave a comment

Jessica Gupta felt isolated as the first of her friends to get pregnant, before she knew that motherhood would bond her to women she barely knew.

“I thought that what I was going through emotionally and physically was something other people couldn’t understand completely,” she says.

And even if friends do have kids, it can be hard for them to remember all of the minutiae that occurs weekly and monthly as your body and your baby grow.

“When I was pregnant, I was connected to two women that were due at the same time as me,” she says. “We started chatting and the relationship grew. I kid you not, there were days when we would probably send over 50 text messages between the three of us.”

Jess and her new cross-country confidantes supported each other through the physical and emotional changes that carried them well into motherhood.

“I think what’s really special is they were the first people I told when I went into labor,” she says. “They were the first people I really reached out to because they had been with me through it all.”

The experience inspired Jess to create Taavi, an abbreviation of “it takes a village,” to match together moms-to-be from all walks of life.

“Getting out of the house can be tough,” she learned after the birth of her daughter. “It’s really intimidating to put on clothes and do your hair and go meet other mothers.”

“What I wanted to create for women was a support system because that’s what I had created for myself,” says Jess, noting the importance of doing so before baby, when you have the “mind space” to “focus on building strong bonds as women first.”

Sharing a similar mindset with her co-founder, Renee, was also helpful in creating a partnership in the early days of Taavi.

“When I met her, we had this really natural connection of ‘hey, we want to honor women during pregnancy,’ to focus on the woman, not just the mom,” she says.

“It’s been a really awesome relationship because we’re both mothers, we both had different experiences in our pregnancy and so we can speak from different vantage points,” she says. “At the same time, we believe in this immense need for community for moms and the support that comes from that community.”

While plenty of pregnancy apps and groups provide information about every milestone and symptom, it was important to Jess and Renee to focus on building relationships between mothers.

“The goal is that we’re actually creating dialogue or creating intimate connection through nurturing friendships,” she says.

How this Mompreneur Makes it Work

Just shy of three years into motherhood, Jess has built a relationship with her daughter using a similar support structure—rooted in the routine that toddlers find comforting, which affords a few moments of solace every parent needs.

“There are some routine components that I started to put into place this year, which has been incredibly helpful,” she says. “One of the goals I had this year was to wake up before my daughter and actually shower and be ready.”

Jess also spends a few minutes in the morning alone writing in a journal about the things she’s grateful for and the things she wants to let go. So she’s refreshed and has a cup of coffee in hand by the time her daughter wakes up.

“I have to be that backbone of routine for my daughter too,” she says. “I think that makes her happy and gives her something to look forward to every day.”

“She’s a stickler for plans. I think that’s just part of their age group. They want to know what they can expect.”

Structure also helps Jess balance the less predictable path of running a startup.

“As an entrepreneur, I think the hardest part is not knowing exactly what you should be doing all the time,” she says. “One thing that I’ve been trying to achieve more of is setting weekly goals as opposed to these grandiose quarterly goals.”

Compassion is also key for Jess. When we spoke earlier this year, neither of us knew how timely her words would be, “understanding that I know shit happens, life gets in the way.”

“It’s hard because in the space of creating your own company, you don’t have a boss telling you you’re doing a great job,” she says. “You don’t have traditional reward structures.”

Jess has realized the reward for any of us achievement-oriented mothers comes in the compassion of reminding ourselves and each other “that you’re doing a killer job, even if it doesn’t feel like it.”

“I think the hardest part of motherhood is that as women we forget to take care of ourselves,” she says. “My hope is that Taavi will bring back some of the nourishment that we we don’t get to experience daily.”