I spent last week getting ready for our first public appearance after launching Nesting Days. Honestly, I needed some time to recover from the craziness of running a Kickstarter campaign and getting out all the first orders. Between the sew shop, the post office and home deliveries, I’ve had my hands full! It seemed like just the right time to get out there and meet some new families.

Getting our booth ready was a lot of work, but brought me back to the ‘making of’ stage, preparing a booth, painting, building, and figuring out the unknowns -- finding sandbags, being social online, using instagram...

I woke up early Saturday and loaded up the truck--the bed was full and tied down with a rope that was too long, but we made it work. We got there and met all the other vendors, mostly small food companies and flea market usuals driving in from all over the Bay Area to set up shop. We got our little cup of vendor coffee and built up Nesting Days.

 Nesting Days on Treasure Island[/caption]

We met so many moms, pregnant women, new dads, new families, babies, grandmas, grandpas, girlfriends, cousins, aunts, uncles, and they all would see our sign and our photos, then look at our newborn carrier on the mannequin and literally point and say ‘ahhh’ or ‘wow’ or ‘how beautiful’. It was really amazing to see so many different types of people, at every stage in life, respond to Nesting Days.

Almost every single new mom grandma (especially new ones) stopped to chat and we swapped stories; each one of them was open to skin-to-skin and the power of being with your baby from day one. Some shared the fears and frustrations of their own daughters about to give birth, and how complicated it can sometimes be sharing your wisdom, while letting them be their own mother in their own way.

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The Art of Nesting Workshop Saturday, October 26th[/caption]

Which brings me to some news -- Nesting Days will be hosting a series of workshops starting this month. The first will be ‘The Art of Nesting’on Saturday, November 9th at 10:30am in our Nesting Days garden. We will hone in on what it means to rediscover the power of skin-to-skin and recreating a human nest outside the womb in the first days, weeks and months after giving birth.  RSVP by emailing me at julie@nestingdays.com.

The second workshop will be on the Mother/Daughter relationship and about how cross generational connection can enrich the relationship between mother and daughter to help the new baby come into the world with the powerful union of two generations of mothers.

This podcast is a great example of that connection -- Hillary Frank has a series called ‘The Longest Shortest Time’sharing stories about the early days of motherhood. In this episode, called ‘Nurse, get the handcuffs’ Hillary listens to her own mother share her birth story--the frustrations, fears and setbacks were all the same, but still very different.

In our experience at Treasure Island and talking about the benefits of skin-to-skin care and postpartum transition for new mothers, it was almost unanimous that these new changes, these new evidence based kinds of changes that are occurring in infant care and babywearing, are positive and long awaited for.

There wasn’t much push back, no matter how old they were, women (and men!) really do understand this, We now have the support of science, now we need the support of each other as well.

--Julie