In this week’s episode of Voices of Your Village, I’m chatting all about sleep and why sleep is so crucial not only for our health as parents and caregivers but also for the health of our tiny humans! Sleep gives your heart and blood vessels a break. It is the time when the body can slow down enough to repair and heal. While we sleep, the chemicals flowing in our bodies strengthen and fortify the immune system. It’s when your body recharges and refuels. Sleep is also the time when your brain clears out unnecessary information that you don’t need to remember and stores things into long term memory that you do want to remember. 

I also dive into...

In this week’s episode, I had the opportunity to chat with Barbara Demske, IBCLC, about all things breastfeeding. Barbara experienced immense challenges while nursing her first son. That difficult journey became the catalyst that drove her to become an IBCLC to offer support to new moms who may be struggling to meet their breastfeeding goals. She is the face behind @firstlatch on Instagram and offers e-consultations. Barb and I dove right into all of the questions ya’ll sent my way!

What is normal, in terms of breastfeeding, for a newborn? When will my milk come in? 

Barb recommends getting some sort of prenatal breastfeeding education. This can be...

In this week's episode I dove into something I call the triangle of the growth. When I’m looking at tiny human development I’m looking at three things. I’m looking at the sensory system, emotional development, and at speech and language. These systems are incredibly interconnected and in order to get a full picture of development, we really need to consider all three. 

We all use our sensory system all day long, every single day. The feeling of a chair supporting our bodies, the sound of music playing in the car, the feeling of our clothes on our skin. All of these things are processed by our sensory system. If the sensory system is overloaded and...

This week I was jazzed to chat with triplet mom Desiree Fortin about parenting with the grandparents. Two months before Desiree gave birth to their triplets, she and her husband Ryan moved in with her parents. Desiree shared that she was on bedrest and Ryan was working so living with her parents and having her mom take care of her was a real blessing. 

Desiree shares that when her triplets were born her parents sacrificed so much and were totally hands-on in taking care of the babies. The triplets were all diagnosed with GERD and in addition to needing to eat throughout the night, they also needed to be held upright for 30 minutes after each feeding. Her parents dove...

In this week’s episode of Voices of Your Village, I got raw and vulnerable about my experience with anxiety as a rape survivor. After I was raped, I became stuck in a cycle of fear. My anxiety consumed me. Years later, with a wonderful support system, and with the help of therapy, I feel like I am thriving and no longer living in fear. 

An integral part of working through my anxiety was learning to identify triggers. Triggers are things that the brain associates with something else, things that bring back the traumatic experience. My triggers were basements, walking downstairs, button-down jeans, and being alone in a room with a male. Things like having a male massage...

In this week’s episode of Voices of Your Village, I was excited to chat with Anna Sweeney and Meg Steffey Schrier about body positivity and the body positivity movement. Anna is a registered dietitian, eating disorder dietitian, and intuitive eating counselor. She also happens to live in a disabled body, giving her a unique perspective on body positivity. Meg is a registered dietitian, mom of two young kids, sports dietitian, and is especially passionate about the way we talk to our children about our bodies. We dove into the reality of our relationships with our bodies, what body positivity really means, and how the body positivity movement fits into a healthy body...

2018, what a year! Am I right?! Holy moly, you guys, I cannot believe how much happened this year. In this Voices of Your Village episode I am diving into all the amazing things of 2018, the hard stuff this year, and what we have in store for 2019.

Voices of Your Village Podcast

Uhhh, did you know that a year ago this didn’t exist? Not just the podcast itself, but even the idea of doing a podcast was not occupying my brain. In January 2019 I said to Zach, “I would just get to hang out with people and talk about early childhood. That’s amazing. It turns out that’s not all that goes into running a podcast. In fact, we pay a decent chunk of money to...

This week I was thrilled to chat with my incredible sister-in-law Logan Blask (again)! You may remember her from episode 26, our most downloaded episode, where we dove into raising emotionally intelligent kiddos. This week we are diving into empathy and how to model and instill empathy in our tiny humans.

Sibling rivalry. Logan shared that her kids are totally allowed and encouraged to disagree, have their own opinions, thoughts, etc. However, physical aggression has been a hard no from the start. They have a family guideline of “hugs, handshakes, and high fives” as appropriate physical touch. When the twins have a disagreement, they are expected to talk it out and...

For this week’s episode, I had the opportunity to chat with integrative dietitian Bridgitte Carroll. Bridgitte combines food and lifestyle to get to the root of symptoms and helps parents and kiddos resolve health imbalances. Bridgitte attended a mainstream dietitian school but felt like she wanted to learn more. This led her to grad school where she learned about functional medicine. Finding the root cause instead of just treating symptoms was a model of care that really resonated with Bridgitte and she felt inspired to continue learning in order to best serve her clients.

Bridgitte shared that she often focuses on gut health. So what exactly is gut health? It’s the...

This week I was jazzed to sit down with Amanda Townsend of Simply Spoken Therapy to chat all about pacifiers. This is a topic that a lot of folks have questions about and we broke it down from the perspective of speech and language development. Amanda is a speech expert, having worked as a Speech Language Pathologist for 11 years in a variety of settings.

Amanda dove right in and explained the important difference between suckling and sucking. Suckling is a primitive reflex, it’s what infants do. It’s a front to back motion that they use to breastfeed or to suckle on a bottle or pacifier. This reflex is typically eliminated between 6...