Extreme Babywearing

So, we were in the mall last week and the kids were getting tired after being such troopers. I still had some clothes to try on, so Chris grabbed an extra mei tai from the car and threw Seth on his back. I had Liam in an ERGObaby carrier, and we merrily went about our shopping.

In fact, Eliza soon fell asleep in the Babyhawk carrier, and Seth was on the verge as he relaxed on Daddy's back in a custom ballbaby. Liam was snoring (and drooling a bit, I might add) as we finally got out to the car.

Ultimately, what could have ended in an apocalyptic meltdown of the no nap crankies resulted in a sweet bonding time Chris had to show off his awesomeness as he wore our nearly 5 and 3 year old while I snuggled Liam. Our hands were still free to hold our purchases, and we knew right where the kids were.

I asked Chris if it hurt carrying the older children, and he said that it was actually quite comfortable because the weight was evenly distributed around his core and they were positioned correctly.

Plus, he liked getting the attention. ;)

Proof yet again how hot it is to see guys babywear!

The Reason I Haven't Posted In Awhile....

From Day 1 Liam has been absolutely wonderful. I call him my little gnome baby since he looks a bit like an old man.

Here are a few pics of Liam's first few days in the hospital and arriving home:

Rockin' his style as we head home from the hospital.

And straight into a baby carrier. I love this Anaju wrap. I'm borrowing it from our Idaho Babywearers lending library, and don't know if I can give it back anytime soon because I love it so much.

It's made from bamboo and organic cotton (who knew bamboo could be made into fabric?!) and is SO soft and stretchy. It's my favorite newborn carrier.

Snug as a bug!


You'd think with all this sleeping I'd still get things accomplished...yeah, stay tuned for the next post on how well that's working for me.

The Celebrities of the IBC

Disclaimer: These "celebrities" are entirely of my own opinion, and many an attendee was much more involved in the babywearing world either as carrier owners, head honchos, or just all around cool individuals well known in the medical and babywearing community.


As we (meaning the fellow organizers and myself) were planning for the conference, donation after donation kept coming in. From the form of carriers for our lending library (which has become quite the envy of many a conference attendee), money for the conference, or miscellaneous, rockin' items for the goodie bags.


First off, ergo. Not only were they super generous with their multiple donations, I'm falling more and more in love with their carrier because they're SO extremely comfortable!

I now own this green one, and will get LOTS of use out of it, for sure!

Technically, I could still put Eliza in it even while super pregnant, but this picture was taken a few months ago and I now have a large beach ball instead of melon ball for a belly. I can barely find a comfortable position for ME to be in, let alone wearing another child! I could still do it though, for the record.

Here's some amazing ergo women. Elizabeth Strong on the right also taught the Mama and Baby Yoga class in the mornings and read the questions for the medical panel (more on that later). Basically, if it wasn't for ergo, the Conference wouldn't have been nearly the success that it was. Ergo rocks, that's all I can say.
OK, the story behind the fake baby. They provided a "realistic baby" to test out carriers which was weighted according to the average infant to help mommy or daddy's figure out how to wear their kiddies comfortably, even if they didn't have a "baby" with them at the time.

The Conference had a couple of these fake babies. They came in handy when teaching classes on how to use carriers or demo putting them on.

Hannah was helping Diane Pepin try out a carrier, and this definitely isn't the last you'll see of Diane's sweet babywearing skills.

Stay tuned for the next IBC Celebrity post featuring...well, you'll just have to wait and see!

First Day at the IBC

The much anticipated June 9-12 Conference had finally arrived, and I could hardly sleep the night before because I was so excited and a bit nervous for the unknown.









The night before I was a bit worried because of the locking the keys in the house incident. It required that I crawl through my bedroom window at nine months pregnant (funny now, but pretty exasperating at the time!) much to Seth's amusement.



Wednesday morning I awoke and arrived nice and early to the City Library where Command Central was set up and begin manning the registration table.

Just ignore the water retention. Blach!

I also had to rely on other people's photo taking during pretty much the whole conference because of manning the registration table, but if I linked it right, you can check out our Conference Pictures on Facebook. Or just search in facebook for the "3rd International Babywearing Conference."

Classes began and I am still shellshock with the caliber of instructors that we had. Here's an on-line viewing of our Conference Program so you get a little feel for how supremely cool it was to be in the presence of such amazing people.

The day ended with our Keynote Speaker, Kelley Mason.

She was SUCH a fun person to get to know and extremely personable. I was a bit starstruck with how many baby carrier owners and VIP in the babywearing world came, but that's for the next post.

Stay tuned!

Old Faithful

Our Yellowstone adventure continued onto Old Faithful.

While at the Fountain Paint Pots, Seth and Eliza got the biggest kick out of the geyser there, so we knew that Old Faithful was a must before heading back home to rest up for the beginning of the 3rd International Babywearing Conference.

Chris knew what was in store at Old Faithful, so he wasn't as amused.

Until I brought him inside the Old Faithful Inn which he had only seen from the outside when he was a little kid.

Needless to say, that's his kind of architecture and kept taking pictures:

It made the whole trip worth it to see the look on his face! Check out this online photo gallery to see what I mean.

He LOVES exposed beams in architecture.

After going up a few floors to get different angles, Eliza was getting quite squirmy, and Old Faithful was due to erupt within the next 1/2 hour, so we decided to treat ourselves to some ice cream in their little shop.

We got a pre-show with another, much smaller geyser that went off while we were settling into our bench eating our ice cream.

Happy and content with some assorted flavored ice creams to try, we enjoyed listening to the different languages around us until Eliza decided she was done after two minutes and Chris strapped her back on her back.

We were sitting next to a sweet Japanese family that kept themselves highly entertained with our little monkey on her daddy's back!

And then, after all that waiting, it erupted!

The continued eruption was oohed and aahed by the international crowd. We heard Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, German, and many other languages mixed with British and different American accents from around the U.S.

Having Yellowstone so close by makes it fun to see all these different cultures and nationalities right on our doorstep!

So what did the kiddies think of it all?

I accidentally cut half of his hand off while taking the picture, but when I asked Seth what he thought about the geyser, and he just looked at me, smiled and gave a thumb's up.

Good enough for me!

And then it was time to go home. Too bad we missed being able to see the new Visitor's Center currently under construction (it's scheduled to open sometime in August this year), but we'll just have to come back!

Stay tuned for the first day of the Babywearing Conference, in which I was manning the Registration Table and forgot to take pictures of my own, so I'll be "stealing" pics from fellow babywearers. :)

Babywearing in Yellowstone

Today I've been nesting, so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to share how amazing last week was with the International Babywearing Conference.


We went for a day trip to Yellowstone on Tuesday with a few early arrivals, and when I volunteered to help with that I was NOT pregnant so needless to say, sitting in a car nearly all day was not a favorite for my little bun in the oven.

We stopped and got some Burger King breakfast sandwiches on the drive up though, so the other kiddies felt like royalty with their BK crowns!

Seth took the crown quite literally and wore it in the car pretty much all day.


Eliza also took her crown literally and purposely put her sippy cup so shield her from unwanted photography. SUCH a princess!


Then, we arrived using the West Entrance through West Yellowstone to the park, where others in our group spotted a bear while we glanced bison, pronghorn, and some various birds (they just looked like spots on the camera, so sorry, no pictures!).



We also enjoyed road construction and traffic jams, but I didn't think it was necessary to take any pictures of THAT experience!




We set up our "make your own" sack lunch area sponsored by:


Olives and Applesauce baby carriers, and so we had applesauce to go with the lunches (we thought about olives but didn't have a feasible way to store them in sack lunches).

Some of the fellow babywearers getting loaded up with food for the day. We had roughly 100 people sign up for the day trip, but only a 1/4 showed up for the free lunch, so we used the leftovers for lunches during the rest of the conferencel, which REALLY helped us keep to our budget (we had SO many generous donations, but more on that in another post!).

Chris is on the right with Eliza strapped in his camo mei tai mostly so she wouldn't escape (she has the nickname "Monkey" for a reason!) so there's a lot of practical reasons to babywear.

Everyone grabbed their goodies, introduced themselves, showed off all the different kinds of baby carriers (which is nothing compared to later on in the week!), and eagerly headed off into the park.

All fully stocked with delicious sack lunches, we took off to enjoy the sights of Yellowstone!

We stopped at the fountain paint pots, which had thermal pools of a beautiful turquoise that also smelled like rotten eggs (Seth nearly gagged and held his nose...he also didn't think I was being funny when I tried blaming the smells on him).

Stay tuned for more pictures and fun from Yellowstone soon. I don't want to overcrowd the posts. :)

In the meantime, here's our Idaho Babywearer's post on a bit of the day. We all had SO much fun!

One Week From Now....

The Conference will begin!

We did goodie bags last week, and boy, are they awesome! The link is stolen from Kimber's blog, who's the main organizer and crazy person that had the idea to mention Rigby as the host for the Conference in the first place, so click on the link to see most of the main Organizers in action (we were just missing Heidi) and you'll also get to see some prego pics of me slouched on the floor.

I'm doing a lot of dotting the i's and crossing the t's now with my Organizer duties, but as excited as I am for the Conference, I'll be SO relieved to see it done and over with.

I'm nearly 35 weeks along now, and I'm feeling it. I've worked so hard with fellow hard-workers to make this historic event a success, that I want to see it in its completed glory!

Then there's my younger brother's wedding to attend (I've been making the silk wedding flowers for it) next Saturday.

I also have my precious baby boy to look forward to, but he'll have to wait just a tad longer. He better, anyway. I don't want my water to break while manning the registration table!

BABIES!!!!

I just had to share this adorable trailer for the movie Babies that I got from a Pampers e-mail.



My favorite little scenes are at the very beginning (Seth and Eliza are like that) where they beat on each other, one reacts, and the other just keeps playing away pounding the rock. Awesome. I also love all the babywearing!

We get to watch a special viewing of this precious movie during the International Babywearing Conference, and I'm SO excited for it!

I'm also getting more and more nervous as the time quickly approaches (just over a month away, ACH!!) and just hope that I can be organized enough for the Registration Table to go as smoothly as it can, since that's what I'm mostly in charge of.

After we found out we were pregnant, that was the "safest" job I thought I could have as one of the Organizers for the Conference, but I may retract that idea as the first day of the Conference begins.

Deep breaths....I think I need to do some prenatal yoga and listen to my hypnobabies CDs (more on that in another post).

What was something you loved from the trailer?

My Modeling Career

3rd part in a series

Chris's favorite picture of me, which is at his desk in the PD.

Yesterday we had a photo shoot (I'll post those pictures when they're ready) to show off all of the amazing carriers that have been donated to the Idaho chapter of Babywearers International.

Yes, I have become a model. :)

It was a short-lived dream I once considered as a teenager when trying to figure out what to do with such a tall, lanky body.

Realizing that ethics aren't really a strong suit amongst models (have you ever watched a model search reality show?! Oy vey!), I went on to getting a college education instead.

Little did I know that one day I would be modeling amazing carriers from throughout the world for an International Conference!


And I have been surrounded by amazing, babywearing people. We should make our own reality show to combat the sleezy supermodels out there!


Oh, and can I just say how comfortable the majority of the these carriers are? Not going to hear that amongst many models wearing next to nothing, taping parts of the body to lift up and tuck in while donning skyscraper heels. I could wear Eliza in this ergobaby for hours and not get tired!
It's been SO fun to include my children in this modeling experience, though I must admit, Eliza is quite the ham for the camera (I have a whole post dedicated for that so stay tuned!)

Here are some of my favorite shots (usually because of the little miss I'm toting, but the photographers have done a great job making the whole picture look awesome):

OK, now, posing next to a gorgeous person like Tiffany is quite the undertaking, especially since she's also an amazingly talented dancer that nearly made it on So You Think You Can Dance.

I don't think life can get any better with love shots like these!

Yes, my hair is different at every shoot. And as you can tell by Eliza's age, some of them were only weeks apart from each other!

While babywearing is the only time I'd ever do a "behind" shot for the camera:

And finally we've even gone fancy with some B&W shots:

Nothing like getting the kiddies in on the modeling action!



Ultimately, I found my place amongst these REAL models:

Yup. My kind of people.

I just love how cute and happy I feel while snuggling my child in these carriers. I'll take that kind of modeling career anyday!