Moms in Business Unite Announces Inventor Showcase Participants - PR.com

Moms in Business Unite announced the nine Inventor Showcase participants for the August 3 San Diego conference. Attendees will vote for the Best New Product/Service during the event, and the winner will be announced at the afternoon reception.San Diego, CA, July 09, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Moms in Business Unite, offering a unique educational conference and ongoing resources to enhance the professional and personal lives of women and mom business owners, today announced the nine women who will participate in the Inventor Showcase at the August 3 conference. Showcase participants will be vying to win the Best New Product/Service award, which will be decided by attendee votes and announced at the afternoon reception.

“We’re blessed to have so many talented entrepreneurial moms and women in Southern California,” said Randa Cote, MIBU president. “Innovation will definitely be on display at the Inventor Showcase, one of the conference’s most exciting parts, and we look forward to another spirited competition. Last year we had two winners due to a tie vote.”

The 2011 Inventor Showcase participants, selected from many deserving applicants, are:

· April Morse, Weber’s Cabinets, Inc.; maple and cherry cutting board
· Patty Garegnani, Baby Strawberry; unique nursing cover
· Christine Barlow, 5 Phases; shatter-resistant glass baby bottles
· Becky Lauder, Embellish Creative Designs, customized scrapbooks and photo albums
· Sharry Zubrod, Sparkle Farms, form-fitted bloomer shorts for girls 3-7
· Jaclyn Schell, Money MindEd, LLC; financial education for teens
· Jayla Siciliano, Bon Affair, Inc.; all-natural, low-alcohol wine spritzer
· Kirsten Von Kruse, Auntie K’s Kitchen; cashew, pecan and peanut brittle
· Derilyn Atkinson, Designs by Derilyn; Cookie Nummie Monsters

The regular conference price will be available online through July 31. There’s also an option for those who only want to attend the event-ending networking reception; they’ll have a chance to vote for their favorite Inventor Showcase participant and be there when the winner is announced. Learn more and save your place at http://www.momsinbusinessunite.com.

About Moms in Business Unite
Moms in Business Unite is the vision of five women entrepreneurs who recognized a need for a resource for mom and women business owners that provides business education and blueprint solutions to help them be more efficient and successful. MIBU hosts annual conferences (in five cities as of 2011) that feature passionate, expert instructors and relevant business topics in a truly unique learning environment. It also provides ongoing tools, resources, and guidance to support mom and women business owners’ journeys through the various stages of business ownership…so they can achieve their entrepreneurial dreams. To learn more, please visit http://www.momsinbusinessunite.com.

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'Moms in Motion' will help Broadview Heights, Brecksville, other area ladies achieve health goals - Cleveland Plain Dealer

The local "Moms in Motion" team will begin a 10-week practice campaign for the Cleveland Race for the Cure 5K.

The group will meet at 8 a.m. Saturdays at the Chippewa Creek Gorge Overlook in the Brecksville Reservation. The entrance is off Chippewa Road near Heinen's and Panera in Brecksville.

The annual membership fee is $60, which includes a custom-printed t-shirt and access to the team's "Moms in Motion" website. Also, the team membership fee is $100. The team's fundraising will benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure. You may bring your registration fee to the first practice, on July 9.

For more information, visit the team's website.

Return to Broadview-Heights home page

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MOMS Club offers support for local mothers - WEAU-TV 13

(WEAU) -- Readjusting to life as a stay at home mom can be challenging for new mothers. That’s where the MOMS Club comes in, which stands for mothers offering mothers support. Members of the group meet frequently throughout the month doing fun activities for both moms and kids.

When Jennifer Williams first heard about MOMS Club four years ago she was a stay at home mom with her two-year-old son Parker.

“I didn't have very many friends who were also stay at home moms so it wasn't isolating, but it was a huge change,” Williams says.

Enter MOMS Club. “I went to the meeting I thought this was great, it's exactly what I need, I had new friends and my son had new friends, and now my daughter does as well,” she says.

“It's hard to be a working mom, hard to be a stay at home mom, it's just hard to have a child! So it was really great to have other mom's to talk to,” fellow MOMS Club member Kristen Knecht says.

The activities throughout the month vary from trips to Irvine Park, to play dates at the mall, to hanging out at member's homes throughout the winter and exchanging recipes; the fun and support isn't only good for moms, but for the kids as well.

“They don’t go to a daycare or a facility outside the home where there are other children, so having them interact with other kids is very important for a lot of reasons, for their own development and school readiness,” Knecht who has a five and three-year-old tells us.

While the group’s main focus is support the mom's do make time for themselves in a once monthly night out, where no kids are allowed.

“I think MOMS Club in general is a great group for mom's who need an outlet during the day, and a night out during the month,” Williams says.

MOMS Club is an international club; Eau Claire actually has two chapters a north and south side group with about 70 members total.

If you're interested in learning more about MOMS Club you can Click here for more information

If you want more information about joining an Eau Claire chapter of MOMS Club you can email momsclub.eauclaire@gmail.com or call Jonie at 715.563.3015.

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Why Facebook Should Worry About Latina Moms - ClickZ

This has been a very intense week for social media marketing. First, Google announces its second attempt in social media by launching Google+ in a direct effort to take on Facebook. Then, MySpace is sold and will be relaunched with Justin Timberlake as creative consultant. It's clear that everyone wants a piece of the pie of this fast-growing social networking market.

With a Little Help From My Friends

In their attempts to compete versus Facebook, both Google+ and MySpace could also use some help. And Latina moms can be very helpful.

Consider the following facts:

Hispanic moms are one of the fastest growing demographics online.Eighty-two percent of mid- and high-acculturated Latino moms are online.Virtually 100 percent of Hispanic moms online are engaged in social networking.Eighty-four percent of Hispanic moms are on Facebook.Their presence in MySpace is 40 percent higher than white moms (29 percent reach).

These moms rely on family and peer advice, and social networks let them extend their circle of trust. Sixty-eight percent trust word-of-mouth conversations related to brands and marketing activities.

And that's exactly one of the key components that Google can leverage to benefit from this specific segment. Google+ offers Circles, which helps compartmentalize all the people in your life. Google argues that putting everyone under the "friends" label can hurt the ability to share (it can be sloppy and insensitive, according to the search giant).

Latinas On-the-Go

It's not surprising, given the success of Android, that Google+ includes a strong mobile component. From adding location to every post to Instant Upload to add camera phone snaps to a private album in the cloud.

Busy Latina moms are taking advantage of mobile connectivity. And they are also heavy users of social media on-the-go (40 percent more than total women in the U.S.).

Sixty percent of them access Internet from their phones and for one out of four, their smartphone is their primary online connectivity device. Back to Google, in recently acquired smartphones among Latinos, Android is far surpassing other platforms.

Latina moms over-index in accessing social networking sites almost every day versus white women. Not surprisingly then, they access Facebook more frequently than their general market counterparts. Latinas also heavily over-index in other social media tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, as you can see in the comScore Hispanic Online Report graphic below.

Source: comScore March 2011 Hispanic Online Report

The Latina Power

Latino households' buying power will be $1.4 trillion by 2013, and Hispanic moms are the key decision-makers and influencers of 80 percent of all purchases made in their households. There's no doubt of how attractive this segment can be for many marketers. But Latina moms' influence doesn't stay within the limits of their home. Social media is a way of influencing and being influenced in terms of their purchase decisions:

Ninety-plus percent of Hispanic moms consider the recommendation of a family member or a friend as a primary influence in their purchasing decisions.Sixty-plus percent versus the total public qualify as word-of-mouth influencers based on their recommending behavior and size of social network.

Talking about influence power, Latina "mami" bloggers are also exploding, becoming one of the fastest-growing blogging demographics (five times increase in 2010 versus 2009).

What Facebook Should Worry About

The social nature of Latinas finds a true space in social media, where sense of belonging and sharing everyday issues and ideas come to life.

Online Latinas' growing influence goes beyond the U.S.: their networks include friends and family members both in North America and in Latin America. And it also goes beyond friends and family members: 20 percent of them are blogging.

Will Google and MySpace consider the critical role that Latina moms could play in their future success? Will they be able to convince Hispanic moms to abandon Facebook? Time will tell.

In the meantime, considering the latest news in social media, should Facebook be worried?

According to this interesting article, there are five things about Google+ Facebook should worry about. I would like to add one more thing: the growing influence of the Latina mom.

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Older moms told to avoid estrogen pill in weeks after baby arrives - msnbc.com

New government guidelines suggest that women who have recently given birth and are older than 34 or who had a C-section steer clear of certain types of oral contraceptives.

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Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that birth control pills containing estrogen could boost the risk of a blood clot when taken by some new mothers within six weeks of a baby’s birth.

All new moms are advised not to take these types of oral contraceptives in the first three weeks following delivery.

Blood clots, if they travel to the lungs or the brain can lead to serious complications, including stroke, shortness of breath, or even death, said one of the guideline’s authors Dr. Naomi Tepper, an ob-gyn in the CDC’s division of reproductive health.

Tepper and her colleagues analyzed a host of recent studies to determine whether birth control pills raised the risk of blood clots in new moms.

“The evidence we looked at showed that the risk was really much higher than we previously thought,” Tepper said. “That is what spurred the change in recommendations.”

The risk of blood clots in women of reproductive age is normally low. But it goes up significantly when women are pregnant and stays high during the first six weeks following delivery — about 50 out of 10,000 recently delivered women develop a clot each year.

That’s because pregnancy leads to changes in clotting factors, said Dr. Beatrice Chen, an assistant professor and director of Family Planning at the University of Pittsburgh. “Pregnancy causes a decrease in the body’s natural blood thinners and an increase in clotting,” Chen said. “That’s something that happens to all women who are pregnant.”

The risk of blood clots during the first six weeks after a baby is born goes even higher if women are older or have had C-sections, Chen said.  When you add in the extra risk of blood clots associated with estrogen use, then the risks to the new moms outweigh the benefits of using birth control pills to prevent pregnancy.

Post-baby sex? Do we REALLY have to?

That doesn’t mean that women should skip contraception altogether, Chen said.

Studies have shown that women and babies do better if there is at least a year between the birth one child and the conception of the next.

“If there’s less than a year in between, you can have problems with the next pregnancy, including low birth weights and pre-term births,” Chen explained.

Up until six weeks, women in the high-risk category could us implants or injections that contain progestin only, Tepper said. IUDs would also be safe, she added.

The last set of guidelines, which were published in 2010, suggested that women would be safe taking birth control pills with estrogen three weeks after delivery of the baby.

The current guidelines still warn against any woman taking pills with estrogen during the first three weeks after delivery. In a departure from earlier guidelines they advise against using this type of contraception for another three weeks after delivery in women with certain risk factors, such as a C-section.

© 2011 msnbc.com.  Reprints

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Moms: Start early with bits of the "talk" - Cincinnati.com

Some daughters can talk about anything with their moms. For others, it would be blasphemous to discuss something such as sex.

Author Joyce McFadden says talking about sex and sexuality gets easier over time if mothers and daughters discuss it early on. The awkwardness, she says, sets in when the conversation starts too late in life.

McFadden, who is married with a daughter who just turned 15, recently released her latest book, "Your Daughter's Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women" (Palgrave Macmillan, $25). In it, she interviews women ages 18 to 105 who share what they learned about sex from their mothers and others.

"In my practice, I was always sort of sad that women would talk about very similar things, and there would be this feeling of shame and guilt attached to it," says McFadden, a certified psychoanalyst. "I wrote the book to let them know there's a community of women that feel the same way. There's a sense of belonging in that, and that's what I wanted to target."

Question: What are some things mothers can do early on to ease the awkwardness that can come if they wait to talk with their daughters about sex?

Answer: We need to start talking to our girls when they're toddlers, using accurate names for their body parts. If she knows what her earlobe is, she can know what her vulva is. To them, it's just part of their bodies. It also establishes a foundation, and we can slowly add things as our girls grow from toddlerhood until adulthood. The problem is we wait until they're teenagers, and of course, that's the time when it's awkward because that's when they start to separate from us - as they need to do to develop. Because we haven't established it as a normal part of dialogue, it comes out of left field.

Q: What should mothers with teenage daughters be talking about right now?

A: I think being clear on what safe sex practices are is important. If it's my job to teach her about drunk driving, then it's also my parental responsibility to teach her how to keep herself safe from disease and infection. It shouldn't matter that one is sexual, and one is not.

Q: At what point does a conversation about sex and sexuality become inappropriate or even abnormal for a mother and daughter?

A: There are boundaries we shouldn't cross, but we tend to go too far in that and not cross any boundaries and worry that it's all inappropriate. Our daughters don't want to know what sexual positions we like. It creeps them out. They want to know if couples last, how does someone recover from rape, why do women choose the husbands they choose and how we live with our sexuality with broad strokes.

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Moms look back with laughter - Daily News Journal

MURFREESBORO ? Although 1950s television shows portrayed perfect, pearl-clad mothers cleaning and caring for kids, most American moms know that picture of life is far from the real world.

Yet the gap between the two ideals can leave a lot of moms with self-doubt.

"When it comes to parenting, I feel like I'm flying by the seat of my pants," admitted Murfreesboro mom Pam Johnson-Bennett, who has co-authored "Cookies for Dinner" with fellow 'Boro mom Kae Allen. "We've all been there and had those fears we were inadequate or thought, 'I can't believe my child did this.'"

"Even though we think we're under control, it still can go wrong," Kae chimed in.

Their book is a humorous look at the perils and not-so-pretty incidents they've experienced in their "quest to survive motherhood," as their website, www.twoloonsandabook.com, touts.

Don't expect "Cookies for Dinner" to be a handbook on how to be a perfect mother, the authors explained. That notion, most likely leftover from the baby-boomer generation, isn't realistic. Instead, the book is "the antidote to all that," the authors noted.

"The whole thing about this book is that you are not alone on this rollercoaster (of parenthood). We need to laugh (at life)," Pam said.

Sometimes, being a parent isn't all that pretty. In fact, parenthood can make you feel "loony" at times, thus the name for Kae and Pam's collective blog, twoloonsandabook.com.

The authors recall tales of potty training and poop patrol, along with brutally honest stories of disastrous trips to the grocery store, mishaps and mayhem on the "ride of your life."

In one chapter, Kae tells the story of how her home became Chicken Pox Island. She had just brought her third (and last) child home from the hospital, only to discover little, red dots on her other two children. Her husband was away on business and there were no friends or family able to help. "I had no help, no nothing," Kae recalled, now able to laugh about it all. She never told her children they were sick. Albeit an unorthodox approach, she took pink calamine lotion and covered all her children's pox spots, then did the same for herself and her baby, just to make it fun instead of the whole ordeal being traumatic. "They just thought they were getting to body paint," she said.

"To me, that's being a good mom," Pam said.

The book title comes from a culinary catastrophe when she couldn't get her son to eat chicken and dumplings, so she just told him he was going to have "cookies for dinner." It worked. From there, she'd give various foods gross names, just to entice her kids to eat.

A self-avowed obsessive-compulsive person, Pam had expected the arrival of her adopted daughter to be a grand, perfect experience. Friends and family were waiting at the airport to greet them. But after a diaper-changing mishap on the plane home from Guatemala and a bout with gastrointestinal issues, Pam and her husband, Scott, and baby Gracie arrived covered in vomit ? not what Pam had hoped. But soon she learned the reality of motherhood ? it's messy, but it's marvelous.

"As I reflect back on these stories ... I always tell my kids they bring out the child in me. ... I'm the one who is fortunate," said Pam, who became a first-time mother at 47.

Looking back and laughing at those incidents when you thought you were losing your mind can be "therapeutic," and the authors said it has been for them.

"You want people to look at you and validate you," Pam said. Your kids should be dressed perfectly, they should behave a certain way, but that doesn't always happen. "You realize that has nothing to do with being a good mother."

To purchase "Cookies for Dinner," visit http://www.twoloonsandabook.com/ or find it on amazon.com. Purchase price is $16.

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