WIC Peer Counseling

As many of you know I work for Women, Infants, Children(WIC) as a Breastfeeding Peer Counselor. I got hired in December of 2009 and have been working to support women in their breastfeeding(BF) goals ever since.
My job doesn't seem like much, making phone calls, teaching some classes, hosting support groups, etc, but I feel it actually is a very important job.  If you've never had any trouble BF, or never even had the inclination to breastfeed, you may wonder why its such a big deal, but if you are a mom, or know a mom that struggled with BF or never knew anything about it but wanted to know how to do it, maybe even had help from a peer counselor-you may know what I'm speaking about.
This isn't about making someone BF, or making them feel bad about not BF, or how long they did, this is about every mom that wanted to, struggled to and didn't know where to turn to.
When I start hearing in the news that our government wants to completely cut the funding of the WIC Peer Counseling program I don't feel upset about that for my own job, but for all those moms, who possibly won't have the opportunity to FREE help from their local WIC offices. Sure, there are Lactation Consultants(IBCLC) at local hospital's, private practice IBCLC's, La Leche League leaders, etc. who are MORE than capable, to help a mom with BF, I refer my clients to them often and believe they are SO important to moms as well. You know the difference though? As a peer counselor, my job is to seek YOU out. As a peer counselor I have my clients in a binder, a call list and my job is to consistently check in with prenatal and postpartum mom's. I have my phone with me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, no really.. I do. A mom that is on WIC can reach me at anytime if she has a question or a BF issue, sometimes mom's want help, sometimes they don't-the most important thing? I and hundreds of other peer counselor's in the United States are ready, willing and available to help a mom through one of the most crucial start's of a baby's life.
What am I asking of you?
If you feel that BF support is important, whether for yourself or you can understand what other mom's in our community, our state, our country need this type of support, please click this link and fill out the form to let your representative know that you want this put back into the funding.

Legislative Action
Tell your representative

Camping(picture heavy)

We went camping this weekend, just one night, but for me-it was enough. I'm just not an outdoorsy person., I haven't ever really cared for it, but I go and do my best not to complain and really, Josh loves to camp and I want the kids to have the opportunity to love-or hate it-for themselves!
We went after church on Sunday to Wildcat Den(after watching the movie, The Grey, I wasn't thrilled with our camping spot).
The kids help set up the tent:

 and then we basically let the kids play and we relaxed until it was time to start the fire which the girls were fascinated by the flint:

Josh thought those huge campfire marshmallows would be good for smores but we found they were a pain to cook,the kids didn't care!

It took Kaylyn 10 minutes to get through this!
Here are my 4(..well 5 though he didn't want his picture taken) reasons for going camping!

Made to Crave

I mentioned this book in my last post and I wanted to talk about it a bit more.
I'm not yet at my goal weight, but my heart is there and in time I'm going to get there. I've half-heartedly  tried to lose weight after every child. I pushed it from the front of my "must fix now" list because I didn't feel convicted it was a big problem. So what if I had extra pounds or more than just extra, I "just" had a baby, or I had 4 kids, aren't I allowed to have an imperfect body? Imperfect? Yup. Eating what I wanted, being lazy, not exercising? Nope. I knew better than that, but I excused it away, made it acceptable. The only problem was I didn't feel good about the way I looked, the way I felt in my clothes. I heard about Lysa Terkhurst and her book Made to Crave. I got excited about it the way I got excited about every other New, Exciting, Amazing weight loss program. I of course got online and checked out the book, the resources, the freebies and thought, cool! I'll like that on facebook and be good! Add that to my growing list of emails, you know, Weight Watchers, Jillian (from Biggest Loser), Biggest Loser, Spark People...you know how all those emails you sit and read motivate you to eat right and workout! Yea. No.
So I ignored it like I did everything else but I kept hearing more about it through radio, facebook, and got the guilt trip.

AKA-

conviction 

 Black Friday. Yup. That's when I picked it up. The Family Christian Bookstore had it for the Doorbuster sale of $5! So I picked it up and stacked it and there it sat for the next month. I had told a friend and my mom that I had bought it, so they would ask me every so often-"Hey! Did you start that book yet?" ummm. no, I didn't. Tomorrow. I totally will start it tomorrow. 

I'm not even sure what day I actually did pick it up on, but once I did. I was done. I didn't even make it to chapter one.

 Lysa had me at Introduction

The introduction is titled: Finding your "Want to".  I mean really, how did she know? God knew. I had heard her speak the little blurbs on KLOVE from her Proverbs 31 ministries and knew she was enjoyable and fun to listen to and her book was no different. So right there on the intro page is this:

 "It's not the "how to" that's missing. It's the "want to"... really wanting to make changes and deciding that the results of those changes are worth the sacrifice"

Worth the sacrifice-yea that was something I rarely did when it came to food and exercise. I always made it fit into my life. If I was too busy, had something to celebrate or really if I just didn't want to-I didn't sacrifice anything.  The further I got in the book the more I realized this was what God wanted for me. I had put this off for way too long, it couldn't be ignored and I wasn't going this alone. God cares about me too much to let me sit in this state. He wants my best, wants me at my best, so now is the time to do it.

I haven't done the study guide, just the book, I want to dig deeper as I'm still continuing on this journey of weight loss, but I'm so excited that as I go along this journey-my relationship with the Lord is what I am craving more and more. When I am weak, He is strong....more to come!