Land Beyond Zion at Winter Break

Over winter break, my family spent the Christmas holiday with my sister and her family in southern California. We drove there from Salt Lake City. My husband was only able to take off one of the two weeks from work, so as we headed home from SoCal, we dropped him off at the St George Airport and stayed in the southern Utah area for a couple of days; specifically Land Beyond Zion.

Land Beyond Zion is a fun campground/vanlife spot right on the UT/AZ border. Shanti has built out a beautiful place to camp comfortably with flush toilets, running water, an outdoor shower and claw foot tub, WiFi, and a shared outdoor kitchen. It has multiple sleep options: from BYO tent, RV, or van with full hookups to a canvas platform tent (with heater!), an RV, or a tiny house. There’s a lovely spot with hammocks hung, and a play area for kids. She has plans to continue building more amenities and dogs are welcome!

Kicking myself for not taking photos of the structures she’s built; mostly on her own too!

My oldest with Shanti’s dog, Sunny

It’s 30 minutes from Hurricane and 50 minutes to Zion National Park. It’s 20 minutes from Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. It’s super close to Gooseberry Mesa, about an hour to St George, and 90 minutes to Bryce Canyon National Park. It’s a wonderful basecamp to all kinds of outdoor exploration and adventures.

It actually rained most of the time we were there, so we did no hiking, but it was still fun and relaxing. We had no pressure to actually do anything… and we kind of didn’t. We played a competitive round of Phase 10, we chilled in hammocks, and we slept in; even thru an epic sunrise that Shanti was gracious enough to share a photo of.

One rainy afternoon, I attempted to paint that beautiful sunrise in watercolor and made a video of the process. You can view it here. At the end of the day, I couldn’t get my paints to make that peachy-pink sky (at least not at the vibrance I wanted, so I did another one after I got home in gouache. They’re very different, but I love both for different reasons.

As the rainstorms cleared and we headed home, we stopped at the Cinder Knoll trail in Hurricane to take photos of the Pine Valley Mountains with snow and Red Cliffs Desert Reserve in the foreground. The puddles were serendipitous.

Check out Land Beyond Zion on its own website, but also on AirBnB and HipCamp.

Shanti is hosting two retreats for adults this spring; one at the end of April that is hiking and running focused with Kathy Pugh. Click here for info about that retreat.

She’s hosting another at the end of May with amazing photographer Michelle Craig. Click here for info about the May retreat. If I didn’t have other stuff happening at the end of May, I’d be attending Michelle’s retreat!

Also… I love the logo I designed for Land Beyond Zion. It really turned out awesome. I’ll write a post about that on its own at some point.

Donating Breastmilk, My Story

*I wrote this in the spring of 2017 (back when I ran a parenting blog). I was working on weaning my youngest and how I handled an oversupply of milk.

As humans, we’ve developed ways to donate blood, tissue, organs, and even sperm and ovarian eggs in recent generations, but human milk has been shared since women began having babies. I first learned about milk donation when my mom told me that she had donated milk when I was a newborn. In 1978, a time when breastfeeding rates were pretty low, she had a lot of extra milk but she couldn’t bear to pour it down the drain. Through the Nursing Mother’s Counsel, someone came to her house to drop off sterile bottles and then pick them up once my mom had filled them and bring them to a HMBANA milk bank in San Jose, CA. She didn’t even have a breast pump that worked very well back then, she hand expressed her milk!

Cut to 2009 when my oldest son was a newborn. I became friends with five mamas I met in our Bradley Method Childbirth class and we got together a couple of times a week when our babies were all newborns. We chatted, nursed our babies, commiserated about postpartum life, bonded, and breastfed lots more. One mama mentioned that there was a milk bank locally that gave mamas a brand new breast pump as compensation for donating (this bank has since closed). I was curious about it since I’d just dropped $300 on my breast pump (this was before insurance covered pumps!), and I did a little research on what the requirements were. I learned that they required a minimum donation of 80 ounces at once. After going back to work, I had an oversupply and I was running out of room in my freezer. The week I was going to get the process started, a massive earthquake shook Haiti. The outpouring of support was huge and every time I called the milk bank, I heard a recorded message saying they were so overwhelmed with donations for Haiti that they didn’t have anyone available to take my call. I left three messages and when I never heard back, I gave up.

We ended up using most of the milk I had in my freezer anyway. My oversupply evened out and my day care provider was overfeeding my son at times, so by the time he was seven months old, I had almost nothing left in my freezer. In hindsight, I guess it was a good thing I didn’t donate milk, but it would have been nice to share some of my excess.

Four and a half years later, my second son, M was born and I was able to be a SAHP. I still had my breast pump and I only pumped to relieve engorgement rather than to try and build a stash in the freezer. The few times my husband or my mother-in-law tried to give M a bottle, he hated it and screamed. Since I was not working outside the house full time, it was easier for me to just keep nursing and not bother with bottles at all. 

I had an oversupply again and my youngest slept in longer stretches than my oldest did as a newborn. So I often found myself engorged and needing to pump to relieve the discomfort. Within a week, I was running out of room in my freezer and needed to figure out what to do with it. Throwing it away was simply NOT an option.

Why didn’t I donate through an official milk bank?

When my youngest son was born, there was no HMBANA bank close to me in Utah (only CA or CO) and I would have needed to donate a minimum of 150 ounces for them to pay for me to ship frozen milk to them. I have learned that this has now changed and the 150 ounces doesn’t have to be all at once. At the time, I didn’t have enough milk to meet that minimum, but I still had milk to donate; milk that would be thrown away or made into popsicles since my son wouldn’t take a bottle. There are a multitude of reasons why I chose not to wait until I had enough milk, but one of them was because I needed the freezer space.

Another reason I chose to donate locally was because of how much banks typically charge families for donated milk. I totally understand that it costs money to run a milk bank with lab screening, donor screening, pasteurization, etc. But I really struggled with the idea of families having to pay between $4 and $6 per ounce for donated milk; milk that was free for me. Sometimes health insurance will cover it if a doctor writes a prescription, but it’s up to the family to submit a claim and get reimbursement from insurance. If a family would rather give their baby breast milk than formula for whatever their reason, especially if it’s not due to a medical issue, it made me sad how expensive it would have been for them. That reason is why I was perfectly happy to donate locally.

With how I donated milk, there wasn’t an official process. I posted in my local Eats on Feets and HM4HB Facebook groups to find a recipient. These are networking tools to help mamas with milk get in touch with mamas and babies who need it. They focus entirely on networking and make it very clear that any donor screening, milk screening, medical information, and advice is 100% up to the mamas to figure out.

I shared how much milk I had, where I was located, and the fact that I was on no prescription medications, not consuming alcohol, a non-smoker, and I also included that I do consume dairy products (since some babies can be sensitive). I made it clear I was only interested in meeting someone locally for milk, I was not willing to ship it.

From there, I got a few messages from moms who were interested and we chatted. I had one dad send me a message claiming he was looking for milk for his wife, but I told him I wasn’t comfortable donating milk to a man if I didn’t also get to meet the mom or the baby who would be drinking it. I know there’s a niche market for breast milk fetishes and body builders drinking human milk, but I was not comfortable donating to them.

I met the first mama at a local museum where I met her and her little boy. She suffered from insufficient glandular tissue and wasn’t able to produce enough milk to feed her baby. His tummy struggled with most formulas, so she was looking to donor milk. He ended up having a sensitivity to cow’s milk products, so he only got a little bit of my milk.

The second mama I donated to was a rock star! We met at a local restaurant and she explained that she had just adopted a newborn baby boy and she was inducing lactation so she could breastfeed him. She struggled to produce enough, so she looked to donor milk to supplement. She brought tears to my eyes with her story because it was something I had considered back when we struggled to get pregnant with my youngest son. If we had gone the adoption route, I had hoped to breastfeed too. 

My major take-away from this experience:

I am in the process of weaning my youngest son who’s 2.5 and while I am SO done with nursing, I know I will miss it tremendously. The pride and confidence it gave me as a mother is really hard to describe, but it’s a feeling I will hold onto for the rest of my life. 

Wet nursing and milk sharing was a societal norm until the invention of formula, and it makes me sad that it’s not at all common today among family members and close friends. It’s often discouraged and considered too risky. People are often skeeved out by the thought of milk sharing in any capacity, even when studies have proven that it can be a safer and healthier alternative to formula for many babies. Donated milk is saving the lives of NICU babies and preemies every day. Milk sharing was an integral part of life for new mamas in previous centuries. If a mama struggled to breastfeed or was ill, she could count on a lactating sister, cousin, or a friend to be able to nourish her baby. I would love to see that sense of “village” restored some day.

I Bought a Mat Cutter!

One day, 20-ish years ago, my BFF Yvonne knew I was looking for a job after being fired from the last one (long story there). She came over and wouldn’t leave until I filled out an application to work at the picture framing store where she was a manager. She knew I would love the work, and I really did. I alternated between full-time and part-time, depending on my school schedule, for about five years at a Bay Area chain called Corners.

For the first few years, we did everything in-house. We cut and joined frames, cut mats, stretched canvas, built shadowboxes, we did it all. I learned how to lay out and cut multi-opening mats. I learned how to sew down an antique christening gown or an autographed football jersey without using any tape or glue. I built shadowboxes for military medals, antique coins, musical instruments, and even a few license plates. I stretched canvases that were up to eight feet long and cut frames to fit. It was such a FUN job.

The sales side wasn’t always fun; especially with customers who had no idea how expensive custom framing is. But my favorite times were the weeks leading up to Christmas. We’d have hundreds of orders to finish before the holiday, so we’d get overtime approved, crank up the music after the store closed, and get it all finished without interruption. I have lots of fond memories of singing and dancing and making some wonderful friends.

I have thoroughly loved framing different things for my home. I may have old, cheap, and mis-matched furniture, but there’s never a shortage of framed photos and artwork to hang on my walls and lots of artwork and empty frames waiting for a larger house to adorn someday.

Last Christmas, I splurged and bought myself a mat cutter. A few times I paid way too much at JoAnn’s for a custom mat to fit a ready-made frame and it was so difficult to justify paying that much when I knew I could do it myself. Of course, my house is small, so I don’t really have anywhere to put it other than the floor of my office/studio.

First thing I cut a mat for??

I framed Kukkiwon 1st degree black belt certificates for my son and myself. We worked our butts off to earn those and they deserved to be displayed with pride.

The next things I cut mats for were my own paintings and prints for my exhibition at Draper’s Art in the Barn, Draper’s Internationals Arts & Crafts Festival, and the Sandy Visual Arts show. Being able to buy full sheets of mat board and cut all of my own mats proved to be a huge money-saving tool.

My knowledge and skill allowed me to cut mats to fit ready-made frames and save on custom framing AND have complete control over how they looked. When I chose mat colors for the exhibition and arts & crafts show, I kept the mats off-white and simple.

When I chose mats for the Sandy Visual Art show, I went with black to really make the colors in the paintings stand out; even though it’s wasn’t necessarily mat colors someone would choose to hang in their home.

I am SO glad I bought this gift for myself. I have so many pieces of artwork I bought from other artists I follow and I cannot wait to get matted and framed.

Next goal: Get a new house with a bigger studio/office space so I can have a whole table for my mat cutter.

New Stickers

In preparation for having booth at a couple of local arts and craft last summer, I started creating stickers that were more wordy and graphic design-y; fun and inspirational and not a watercolor painting.

Here’s what I have at the moment:

This sticker is based on t-shirt artwork I created for a friend a few years ago. She’s a big fan of Dave Matthews Band and asked me to design a pair of t-shirts for her and her daughter. The daughter’s tee is done in the same hand-drawn style and says, “Pick me up, Love. Everyday.” I love how this one turned out. Buy one here!!

I created this sticker earlier this year for my youngest son’s school valentines. It was serendipitous timing that Sticker Mule had a sale on holographic stickers just in time for Valentine’s Day, so he helped me come up with a fun design and it was a winner! Buy one here!!

For this one, I loved the simple words and thought I’d see how it looked with a starry night sky in the background. I went with holographic stickers and I wasn’t thrilled with how it turned out, but the sticker was really popular at my booth over the summer. It’s always surprising what ends up being my favorite artwork as opposed to what other like best. Buy one here!!

This one I did super fast one day when Sticker Mule was having a sale. This saying had been on my list of ones to try and turn into a sticker at some point because it’s really beautiful. Lots of people bought this sticker with a loved one in mind. Buy one here!

This sticker was all my husband. He and a coworker was commenting on how often our kids mistakenly call us “bruh.” It ticks me off when my kids do it to me. Buy one here!!

What are some ideas for future stickers???

Hike it Baby Turtle Fur Tube

I have been a contract graphic designer for Hike it Baby for a long time and this year I got to work on an awesome design for a Turtle Fur tube and it became available just this month.

We wanted it to be a fun, I-Spy activity along with it being sophisticated enough that adults would be happy to wear it too. You can search in the pattern for HiB-branded water bottles, footprints from different animals, a couple of birds, bugs, worms, and beanies, and a frequent character in HiB media: Wox the Wandering Fox.

Order yours here!

I am really proud of how it turned out and I can’t wait to see one in person as soon as they ship. 50% of each unit sold will go directly to Hike it Baby. What a great way to get some cool merch AND support a wonderful nonprofit.