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...

In this week’s episode, I was jazzed to sit down with my husband for a rare face-to-face podcast recording. We dove into the definitions of rape vs. sexual assault and how to distinguish the two. We also talked about the confusion that sometimes surrounds those definitions and sought to clarify them. 

Zach and I compared our upbringings and the conversations, or lack thereof, about physical consent. Toxic masculinity, the role of a woman in a sexual encounter, messaging we receive, guys we dove into alllll that jazz. Ultimately, we decided that just because something is a societal norm doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable and we need to do our part to be a...

This week I was so grateful for the opportunity to chat with Natalie Norton. Natalie is a motivational speaker, coach, and writer who has experienced immense trauma in her life. She uses her emotional intelligence and awareness to cope with her trauma, continue to thrive in her life, and help others do the same. 

Natalie shared the many traumatic experiences she has had. She lost her brother and later she lost her infant son. A few years later, she and her husband became foster to adopt parents to twins and their seven-year-old sibling. After two years with these children in their family, just before the adoption was to be finalized, the children were reunited with their...

This week we are diving deep into the topic that covers 90% of my sleep consultations: SLEEP PRESSURE.

When we look at sleep, there is always more than we see on the surface. So with our tiny humans, we may see behavioral things (like bedtime resistance) but if we dig a little deeper there is often something else happening. And many times, it is sleep pressure that needs tweaking.   

Sleep pressure is like being the right amount of hungry. I don’t want to be a little hungry and only need a snack and I also don’t want to be hangry. I want to be the perfect amount of hungry so that I’m ready to sit down to a complete and revitalizing meal. The...

Today I’m sliding in with a bonus episode all about daylight savings time.  Pre-kids, daylight savings meant snagging that extra hour of sleep in the morning. With tiny humans, daylight savings has the potential to be tricky.  I’m coming in with two plans, Plan A—if you want to prepare and make changes ahead, and Plan B—if you want to see what happens and adjust from there. 

The two biggest factors in sleep are LIGHT and SLEEP PRESSURE (stay tuned—we are diving deep into sleep pressure in next week’s episode). So we are going to use light to our advantage. If you’re planning ahead, we’re going to start...

This week I was jazzed to have OT, Lori Goodrich back on the podcast. First, we dove into the sensory system with Lori on episode four of Voices of Your Village (check that one out if you haven’t already). This time we looked specifically at the sensory system and how it pertains to feeding tiny humans.

When a young child is experiencing challenges related to eating, there are a number of sensory factors that can be at play. Commonly when we think about an eating experience we think of the look, smell, and feel of the food. Lori looks at a much larger picture. Is their body supported in such a way to allow the movements required for...

For today’s episode, I was jazzed to chat with Christine and Sascha, the founders of Mamava. Having experienced the logistical challenges of juggling breastfeeding and their careers, Christine and Sascha were inspired to change the culture around breastfeeding and pumping and help breastfeeding parents reach their goals. Mamava provides freestanding lactation suites that are clean, private, and mobile. Mamava is also an app that provides resources for nursing parents who are facing challenges.

We talked about the barriers a nursing parent may experience while trying to maintain their breastfeeding relationship. Employers may be unsupportive, the laws protecting breastfeeding...