← The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 447: The Powerful Lost Art of Becoming Mother | Beth Barbeau, Indigo Forest
01:35:49
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- [00:00]
Andrew Hawk
Do you want your teenager to go on the adventure of a lifetime, all the while learning the ability to know God's truth, discern wisely, and take godly action in the world? My name is Andrew Hawk and I'm the camp director at the Excel Summer Leadership Camp. Every summer we take teenagers on two week adventures to help them grow in their leadership, discernment and Christlike character. Between camping, rock climbing, hiking and whitewater rafting, campers build lifelong friendships while also training in Excel College's game changing critical thinking method. They'll learn to filter through the cultural messages of the day with godly wisdom and to learn how to apply those in the method in real life context through wilderness first aid and CPR training. A few months ago, I received a message from Melissa, one of our past campers. When her mom and her were overseas, her mother got injured and she used her training to make a huge difference, according to doctors, to be able to get help when it was needed. We love to hear stories like this. Not only do campers lead with practical skills, but also with a deeper faith in Jesus and lifelong community. I want to personally invite your teenager to join us this summer by going to the excel camp.org to learn more.
- [01:02]
Jenny Urich
That's theexcelcamp.org welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Urich. I am the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I have something really special today. We're doing something brand new, which I guess you'll never know about. Beth might share the videos, but we are in Beth's home with this mobile podcast system. Brand new, never used it before, and it's fun.
- [01:24]
Beth
Yes.
- [01:25]
Jenny Urich
Otherwise, we have been in this very, very small room that I record my podcast in. It's very small, our knees are touching. It's slightly uncomfortable. I mean, for you and me it's not, but like I had someone else come and do it and it was super awkward. So this is a mobile system. So we're sitting in your beautiful room here and we're gonna be talking about a lot of things today, but main topic is stretching in all the different.
- [01:48]
Beth
Ways of our lives.
- [01:49]
Jenny Urich
Yeah, there's a lot of ways, a lot of ways that we stretch. So I wanted to let everybody know because Beth, favorite podcast guest around here, she is my wonderful friend and midwife. She has been on six times and this is the seventh.
- [02:04]
Beth
Wow. I love every single time. They're. They all have their own flavors.
- [02:08]
Jenny Urich
Yes. They've all been different. So we've talked about summer survival guides. You could go back to that one. Heading into the summer, it's 154. First aid family rhythms and feeling empowered as a parent. We did Breathing Easy, Navigating Air Quality Challenges. That was episode 164. We did wellness Unleashed and empowering parents and Boosting immunity. That was 202. We did that one. Heading into a fall. 271. Creating a rhythmic childhood. When your life feels chaotic, so many people relate to that. My personal favorite of the six is 28750 things I hope you know, A guide for your children. And then we did 3:38 Ask the Midwife. And we're back again for number seven. We're stretching.
- [02:48]
Beth
Okay.
- [02:48]
Jenny Urich
So we had this experience just recently where it was a big stretching thing for me, something that we had worked on for 18 months. And then when the time came, I started to second guess myself and think, why did we sign up for this? But we went on tour. We did the 1000 hours outside. Really very crunchy worthy tour. It's a mouthful. It's a long name. We did five stops, first ever tour. And at the second stop in Adrian, Michigan, you were there.
- [03:14]
Beth
It was so fun to see you on stage and to see what hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people be so excited to meet you. It was. I felt like I knew someone famous.
- [03:26]
Jenny Urich
It was so cool. I was so, so glad you came. You had not been feeling super well and just sort of were like getting back on your feet. And I was so honored you were there. And actually, one of the stories I open with is about a birth that we went to together, which is like a highlight of my whole life.
- [03:40]
Beth
But.
- [03:40]
Jenny Urich
And you stood up, people cheered for you. It was cool because obviously I told that story in five locations, but that was the only location that you were at. And then after it was over, we had book signings and there's tables set up, there's people milling around everywhere. And you had like, you know, it was like you were just sort of coming out of not feeling good. So I thought, I wonder if she just went home. You know, I would have totally. It. It went kind of long. That show in particular went. Went extra long. We ended up shoring it up for the other locations. But I was like, oh, I wonder, you know, if she just kind of like slipped down, went home. So I asked someone, I was like, oh, did Beth leave? And they were like, oh, no, she has throngs of people around her. Like, we should have set you up your own table.
- [04:22]
Beth
I came to say just like, wave to you, goodbye and. And it turned out that there were a lot of my past clients there. I had turned them all on to a thousand hours outside. And they were so excited, like, oh, Beth. And some of them I hadn't seen in 10 years, you know, Beth. And they're like, oh, hi. Hi. And then there was a lot of people going, oh, hi Beth. And I'm thinking, oh, I don't know if I, I don't know if I remember you. Oh. And then they're like, you don't know me, but I watch you on the reels. Oh, oh, that's fun. So it became this wonderful time where I was trying to get it basically just wave to you goodbye. But your, your line was so excited to be there for you. One was like, I have to get one of my clients. She said, I have to get home to nurse my baby. It's one of the first times I've been away at bedtime. But I determined to get Jenny to sign the book. I want to meet her because you've talked about her. So we got to get a picture of her together with all of us. But yeah, it was really fun to see that kind of a crowd come together. Right. Everyone's pretty much family kind of age range, a lot of similarities of thought and it made for a very cohesive audience, I thought. And it felt good to be a part of it.
- [05:34]
Jenny Urich
Yes. I just felt like we should probably just travel together, you know, just like similar hearted, similar view on the world, similar views on children and child rearing and all of those types of things. And it just all weaves together. And I think that it was so telling that so many people wanted to talk to you. And that's what it was. It was like we had a table set up. Dustin and Sarah had a table set up for their this Way Home. Emily and Jason had their really very crunchy table set up. And I was like, in retrospect, I would have had a table set up for you. I mean that's what we should have done and we wouldn't have known. But it was very much like people are clamoring for your information, but also your presence. Like the way, the calm way in which you come at the world, the, the sort of like foundational wisdom that you have. And I. It's a big missing piece today in this harried world. A lot of confusion, so much information. And so it made sense. It made. And it was like a long time later. I want to say it wasn't like, oh, you know, the, the thing ended and it's 15 minutes. 20 minutes has gone by. I haven't seen Beth. She probably left. It was like 45 minutes later. And they were like, oh, no, no.
- [06:48]
Unnamed Speaker
She's.
- [06:49]
Jenny Urich
She's got her own line.
- [06:52]
Unnamed Speaker
So we.
- [06:53]
Jenny Urich
We thought we would talk about this concept of stretching. That was a really big stretch. But really for both of us, our journeys have been one. Like, for me, it's didn't start. It started very late. For me, it didn't start till my late twenties when I started having kids, and then more so homeschooling and then. And more so recently starting a business. But I did spend a lot of my life not really stretching that much. You've been stretching for longer than I have. But I think it wasn't really anything I was expecting. I wasn't expecting that I would have to stretch as much as I have.
- [07:28]
Beth
That's so much what parents experience. And I think that if you look about having babies on social media in general or online in the web, having babies is about who's your OB a lot of times, and it's about your ultrasound pictures, and it's about your baby registry. It's really important to, like, deal with where you're spending your money and to get all the right stuff. That's what I'm concerned about. Is that the part where I think people don't realize how much parenting is stretching?
- [07:58]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [07:58]
Beth
And that. That doesn't mean that something's wrong. And for sure, we don't tend to support families in their stretching a lot of times. Right. Unless you specifically seek out a certain community or a certain care provider or different things. Like, so I love it that you said that. And you've always been really bold about seeing these switches and these changes. When you said, like, I didn't. I didn't know that I would have to stretch that. That was a surprise.
- [08:22]
Jenny Urich
And I love the wording of it because we're actually stretching physically. We're stretching physically as we get ready for, you know, if you're the woman, you know, you're stretching to make room for this baby in your body. And then. Yeah, I just was. It was a shock to me how different it was than the life I'd had before, which I could control to a very large degree. And then how much it sort of rolled away from me and then how much I've been required to stretch since becoming a parent. And there's a lot of things going on. We're in a really big bit of a turmoil situation right now. But there's. It's like Once you have these children that you have to care for, life hands you all of these opportunities where you're going to have to stretch further, to make it work, to provide, to protect, to learn, learn. And it doesn't end. It doesn't end. I kept thinking. I remember thinking, like, at what point will it be back to how I was before? Like, you kind of are expecting, like, well, once they're sleeping through the night or once they're nursing, but it does not. And we even have been talking between the two of us of like, you know, well, then you get to the part where they're driving. Then you get to the point where they move out. Then you get to the part where, you know, there's. They're dating. There are all these things. And so you. And then it's going to be grandchildren. I mean, it's all. It's this switch that happens, and then you're stretching for the rest of your days.
- [09:45]
Beth
I think that parenting is enhanced by our stretching. I was looking at the whole definition of stretching. Like, we all sort of know, right? But it was interesting. There's some different pieces to cause limits of a person to be pulled, to amplify or enlarge beyond natural limits or proper limits. Interesting. To expand, to become extended in length or breadth or both. To extend over a continuous period. You know, as women have. Families have been reaching out to me around being sick this winter, and it feels like, you know, these cycles of illnesses have been particularly troubling and gone round and round. They talk about, I'm out of margin, I'm overstretched, I can't make decisions anymore. It's like I don't even know what to do. I've tried all this stuff, and I like using the word stretching. I came up with it recently for myself because I just felt overwhelmed and, you know, like, trying a lot of new things. Like to be in your 60s and never have been particularly fond of social media and to kind of scorn having phones and have clients who tease me about they should buy me a GPS because I won't get the right phone to do it. You know, years ago and stuff like that, I was still using paper, paper maps in my car a long time ago. Not most recently, but stretching has a more positive word. That's like one of my clients who was having a baby at 48 by surprise, and she said, you know, I'm tired of calling contractions painful. I want to call them powerful. So the reframing of things can give us more energy to handle them. And More capacity to not to be possibly energized by the challenge instead of de. Energized by it, right? So this idea of, like, okay, I'm going, I'm stretching instead of thinking, oh, I. It takes me two hours to put up a reel. So sometimes my reels go up at 9 o'clock at night after everyone's going to bed. Because I've been struggling with how to do it for the last couple of hours. Because I'm the thing, you know, and, you know, like, I hope it looks okay. And it's all new, right? It's stretching. And if I can look, I like it when my kids stretch. I was all about supporting my kids. Stretching, right? We love to help our little kid learn to take their first step. We love to help them do something for the first time. Here I'm gonna show you how to tie a sho. They don't get it right the first time. Why do we expect us to get it right the first time? We're so hard on ourselves as adults. I mean, really. So when a woman comes to their first prenatal appointment with me, for instance, and a lot of times in my case, it would start really early, like as soon as they get a positive test. Because it's not really, for me, just about like the heartbeat, which of course is important, but it's also about her nutrition and how she's feeling and how she's stretching in her body, her mind, her spirit, getting used to things. A lot of times they're really nervous.
- [12:32]
Jenny Urich
I mean, I particularly remember being upset. And I know that you said that that's, you know, that can happen here and there, where you come in and you think, obviously you're so excited for a new life. You're so excited for a baby. And in my case, it was like, will I have the capacity for number four? How am I possibly gonna do this? I've got these three other young children gonna be pregnant. And so you have that moment of you're very nervous and just upset. Not because you're upset because of the baby, but you're sort of. I don't even know if that's the right word. You're just sort of upset. You're like crying. You're like overwhelmed, maybe that's the better word, you know. So you come in early, and I would imagine, I mean, you just come in and cry. That would be like the first appointment, which is like, how am I possibly gonna do this? So I'm gonna sit here and cry. And then things change over time.
- [13:19]
Beth
A Lot of women come in and cry. Some of them were surprised to be pregnant or it's a turbulent time in the marriage to be pregnant or they weren't sure they were going to have another one or this is the one after a loss with a miscarriage. So they're really nervous or there's an endless number of reasons why we have so many mixed feelings at that time.
- [13:37]
Jenny Urich
It's good for people to hear that that's normal. Yeah. Because you feel guilty about it. I think, you know, it's especially when you talk about too with the social media, everything is a celebration. But our, you know, our deep down feelings can be very overwhelming and it's a big responsibility. So those are good things for people to hear for sure.
- [13:57]
Beth
Yeah. That was actually one of my big motivations for retiring from catching or delivering babies so that I would have the capacity to try and construct information for a broader audience like online. Because my clients would remark, my sister in law got pregnant but she doesn't have anyone to talk to. My best friend is having a baby and she's so scared. Do you think you could talk to her for a second or could she come to my appointment? I had somebody who brought her. Her friend was pregnant at the same time. She just brought her to all the prenatal so she could sort of get some of that too. And I'm concerned because this came up in another podcast. I was recently on a podcast for appah, the association for the Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health. They're amazing. They were my heroes 20 years ago and it helped really shape the people who founded it. They really shaped my practice and how I talk to people. We were talking about the different kinds of healthcare, for instance, like there's models of healthcare, there's technologically oriented, holistically oriented and some, you know, technology, for instance, is really sort of overemphasized and over adored. It's kind of worshiped and in another version it's used as in the service of the client or the patient. Right. Different. To give you an example. Anyway, so where I'm coming back to is that I see women getting pregnant and having those big feelings and everyone acts like no one's having them really. And if you're having medical care, you go to get your medical care. And the obs are supposed to have five six minute appointments. According to insurance, the certified nurse midwives are supposed to keep it to about 20. Home birth midwives tend to be over an hour. Although I've been reading online that some of them are like, we don't need more than 30 minutes. I'm like, where is the part where we are in service to women as they move through that powerful lost art of becoming mother? That's what that whole other podcast about, like, the lost art of becoming mother. How do you do that? You don't have to. Not everyone's having a home birth that's not appropriate or they don't want it. That's all good. They're gonna have it in a lot of different places. But everyone's becoming mother if they're doing this process. So what do we do to support it and help them stretch not only their body and their belly. I have to teach them that they have to let their bellies get soft. Some people are so. We're so, so used to having a trim tummy that there's a point in the pregnancy when they start to describe that their tummy's too hard and it hurts and they're scared. It's like, oh, I spent quite a bit of time explaining, no, this is one of those times when you get soft. This might be. If you have been a trim person. This might be the first time you feel your belly on your lap. It might be the first time you feel your breasts resting on your belly. And people just get such a sigh of relief to hear, like, somebody name it. That that kind of stretching like they're supposed to soften your baby doesn't get into the best position for birth towards the end of pregnancy if you've been doing sit ups the whole time. Because if you have too much of an abdominal muscle structure, they can't nestle in deep and then let their back fall forward to navigate the thing. Like, they'll end up sideways, like transverse or different things.
- [17:01]
Jenny Urich
What it really makes me think is that it's like everyone needs a midwife to midwife through the process and to midwife through the change and to midwife through that period of time when. And that's what you do. It's like you come at three days and two days and six days and nine days and 11 days. I don't know, it was like so many days afterwards. And in the other case, it's like, well, obviously you're helping the birth, the actual birth, but the, the mid. Midwife thing, to me, that's what, in my heart and mind, that's what I feel like a midwife is. It's a midwife is someone who helps you to navigate a large change. And. And I almost think, and I don't know if that's weird, but it's like you've, you know, they talk about holistic care from birth until death. And it's like, you know, people that can help you navigate that huge change when someone that you love passes away. My interesting take is because I was with an ob, I mean I've done all of it. I've done that midwife at the hospital, I've done the OB at the hospital, I've done the midwife in the home. And the level of care, it was such a night and day difference. And I think I want to say this. You know, when we stretch that we're talking about, I don't think we can ever fully understand the impact that that will have in the world.
- [18:20]
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- [19:34]
Jenny Urich
Idea what to do.
- [19:35]
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- [20:53]
Beth
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- [21:14]
Jenny Urich
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- [21:16]
Beth
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- [21:25]
Jenny Urich
I think that's one of the big parts. I hate stretching, you know, like that tour was coming, I was like beside myself with doubt. And I talked about this verse at some of the nights and it's in Isaiah and it says, whether you look to the right or to the left, there will be a voice behind you saying this is the way. Walk in it. And I just kept thinking, did I hear the wrong voice? That's what I was thinking. So I was so unbelievably nervous. The whole thing was my idea. And I thought, I've drawn these other families into it. What if they hate it? You know, what if nobody shows up? What if people think it's dumb? But what's interesting is that in retrospect, and it seems to always be like this, people had a phenomenal time and our our kids were able to join in and have these different experiences and I don't know who heard it and what. And I was talking to a mom just yesterday who had come and she started to cry and she was saying I had fear about this one thing and Then I listened to the, you know, what you talked about, the tour, and it really challenged me. And so I want to relate that though not to myself, but to you. And saying that what you have done to become a midwife, the stretching that you did for your life for decades before you and I and our lives intersected, it has had a generational impact on us, like huge for a lot of reasons. I mean, I think, you know, if people knew the inner workings of our relationship, it's like we go to the diner here and there and ask if they'll make our food without seed oils. And they do, they're so wonderful. And we get together and go on walks and I call you, I've called you for a lot of things. Not about health, necessarily, just health, but about discernment. And you've helped me at a lot, have a lot of discernment of different situations in my life. And so I just want to throw that out there. It's like stretching does not feel good. I mean, when you, when your body stretches for your baby, that's hard, you know, by the end you're waddling around, you know, it's hard to sleep, it's hard to turn over all of these different things. But there is really great benefit to the world at large to the circles that you rub shoulders with when you choose to stretch.
- [23:39]
Beth
It's really true. I've been trying to think about how to relate it to the bigger world. Right. How to relate it to our people. And I think that what we're passionate about helps us to be more brave. You're passionate about the safety of children and the well being of their childhood and those big long lists. And I've been passionate about helping people feel empowered about how they have those babies, which is another kind of safety and another kind of expansion. And all of us come in with our different gifts. You really have your faith and you have your goal and you, and you're such a bright learner. You read all these books and then you can talk to everybody. And I'm a gabber and I love to talk. So I can like shape the words and I could do that. But I have other people in my life who are not forward. Like they're not the ones in the public eye. And every person listening is brave in their realm.
- [24:27]
Jenny Urich
Yes.
- [24:28]
Beth
And a lot of times it feels small. And I want to emphasize that we all have our brave, we all have our stretch, we all have the places that we show up the best we can. And it's like kind of been an Emotional day for you and I today because we've been working through talking about our own personal lives and we took a walk in the sun to let the air help us and get focused. But there's still that emotional connection, connection of like feeling friends, of wanting to do a good podcast so that people are inspired or find value or whatever. And I think was so important. And what from my conversations with people lately too is just that we're all doing the best that we can and that a lot of times our brave feels. Here's what I tell people when they're having a baby, right? In labor, it can feel really, it cannot feel good. But nothing's wrong, right? And so on the tour, getting ready, you were really scared. We talked. I remember hearing about it 18 months ago and even I thought, you're gonna, you are funny. You're gonna do what? I tried not to say it. And then like when you caught, like I'm really nervous. And then, and then I saw how you were able to bring it onto the stage and I was like, wow, she marshaled this. She used it as a way to energize forward. And so I think that these small moments of being brave and I thought, like, I have a small moment of being brave. As much as I love talking, I get nervous about how it's going to come together. Will I forget what I want to say? And I did something this week by accident again that I do often, which is that I look for the voices that help. Right. We often come to your podcast, Ginny, because of so many voices that you bring out. And Kim Jong Payne is one of the ones for me. And I know you've had him on several times and I've, I got to see him in person once years ago when the kids were little and he just sort of became my hero because it was so hilarious. And you know, he has these 10 minute podcasts once a week and he's like counseling parents and somehow he uses the examples what are just like your kid would do when he talks about. They're just like a little rudder, he says, like he has like that, you know, English way. I'm like, oh, that's better than what I would have said. And I listen because I don't have little kids now about helping hands and hurting hands. But I need a calm voice. My little kid inside that didn't get parented that great. In spite of my parents best efforts, I need the calming voice. I need to be reassured. And so sometimes I listen to the voices that calm me down. That was like, that's my little quiet moment of brave. So I just want to honor, like, everybody gets to have their quiet moment of brave and whatever it is. Like, a lot of times, raising small children looks like nothing. Like, you're not changing the world.
- [26:59]
Jenny Urich
Right.
- [27:00]
Beth
But you are. I thought I had to raise girls to change the world because I am a midwife. And then I had all boys, and then I learned, oh, I can change the world by raising the best boys I can raise.
- [27:12]
Jenny Urich
Sure.
- [27:12]
Beth
And I watch them take care of their beloved girlfriends, these beautiful, beautiful women, and how much they tenderly show up for them. I was like, oh, oh. Anyway, the little moments count.
- [27:26]
Jenny Urich
Yeah, I think that's a good point. It's like we're giving some examples of stretching that are 10, 20, 30 years down the road, and it doesn't matter. I don't think if your moments of stretching become a podcast or become a tour or anything like that. But the moments of stretching started a very, very long time ago in the small things. They started in the very small things. It was a moment of stretching to have a meeting with a midwife after having two hospital births. Like, these were never anything that was meant to become anything bigger than it was at the time. It was just that it was these small, small things that you do. I mean, I remember when I started 1000 hours outside, and I mean, for several years, and it was just like a big old nothing, you know, and even more sort of a big old, like, you're odd, you know, that was sort of the response. And so we, you know, we share things in the world and we. And we stretch and we serve our families and our kids and our community. And so the whole point is that whoever you're intersecting with, your children, your extended family, the families at your kids school, the families in your neighborhood, when you stretch, it benefits those around you, whoever those people are, and often beyond.
- [28:43]
Beth
Well, I would like to say I think it would help all of us. It would help communities and our families if we normalize stretching. If we normalize that stretching sometimes is a little uncomfortable. So it comes up with me as a midwife, where I'm helping people go into new territory and gather new information and normalizing for them physical changes or decision making, taking on a lot more decision making than they're accustomed to, maybe, or taking on a role with their healthcare providers that lets them steer. But then I also have, like, I have past clients who've contacted me and they're nervous about their children experiencing the wind on the walk. And I think Some of those people who reach out to you. Right. Like, does our hours count outside if the garage door is open? Right. And it happens because it's new. And so sometimes my clients have never been outside. And I'm like, you gotta try this. It's gonna be great. And here the kids are climbing the wall postpartum. Could somebody take them outside, you know, while you rest? And they're nervous about stretching.
- [29:49]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah.
- [29:50]
Beth
And they're nervous about their kids stretching. But with my kids, I wanted to. I did the best I could to help them be comfortable being uncomfortable.
- [29:59]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah.
- [30:00]
Beth
So how can I help my kids? It's not. It's not, of course, that we're trying to do anything harmful, obviously. Like, I go saying, you know, but.
- [30:07]
Unnamed Speaker
You'Re saying with the wind, with their hands being muddy, you know, these being hot, having a mosquito bite. You know, these are different types of things where you feel uncomfortable. And people talk about that with going outside. I mean, when we think about, oh, we're gonna go outside, we think about, it's 72 degrees and sunny, and. But the majority of it is uncomfortable. You're cold, you know, the wind is whipping, there's snow. There's these different types of things. And so, I mean, this definitely is right in line with what we talk about a lot, because this is helping our kids be gritty and have resilience and all of these things that matter for a long time. I. Going back to the very, very beginning, which is I had lived a life for decades that included very, very little.
- [30:55]
Beth
Stretch, heart stretch, life stretch, professional stretch.
- [30:58]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [30:58]
Beth
What.
- [30:59]
Unnamed Speaker
I mean, it didn't have any of it. It's like, I. You know, I even told this on the tour. It was like, I went to school. School was relatively easy. I was decently good at math, so I went to college. I already had some credits under my belt. I got a math degree. I didn't know what to do with that, so just tack on this teaching certificate. Then I went back to school to teach math. And, you know, there were some small challenges here and there, but, like, for the most part, it was very, very linear. And it wasn't until then I had children. And really, that's when the wheels fell off.
- [31:28]
Jenny Urich
But that.
- [31:29]
Unnamed Speaker
And then, you know, we did decide to homeschool, which is counterculture. It was more counterculture even at that time. And then I, you know, I wanted to homeschool very systematically, but couldn't due to just outside circumstances. And so, you know, the stretching, I don't know. I think that you're uncomfortable with it sort of forever and, and especially if you just didn't do it for the majority of your life and then all of a sudden you're in the spot where you are doing it. So yeah, the going outside, I think this might be a lot of people's story is that they went through life in a way that focused on their strengths, which is what you're kind of told to do and supposed to do.
- [32:03]
Jenny Urich
And then all of a sudden you're.
- [32:04]
Unnamed Speaker
In this spot where you're drowning a bit and you're not used to that and you're having to navigate your way out of it. So it's been interesting talking with you and becoming friends over the years. And these conversations about this goes so far beyond the birth. Like you, you think the birth is like this, this is it, this is like the pinnacle moment and what a moment it is. And then all of a sudden you're like, my three month old has a rash. You know, it just becomes like on and on and you don't really know. You're sort of thrown into this spot where you don't really know what to do. And there's not a lot of generational wisdom anymore. Often people don't have somebody to ask and so it just feels like panic. And that's stretching too. But I think you're doing a wonderful job of guiding moms through that. So in particular, one of the things that's come up for you. I guess I don't want to, I want to ask this question before we hit this topic. When you decide to become a midwife and you've been doing this since you were a teenager, at that point, could you have predicted, did you know that you're going to intersect your life with these families and then they're going to call you and be like, my 8 year olds got this bite. And I, you know what I'm saying? Like, does midwife always entail that? And did you know that you would end up being that person too?
- [33:20]
Beth
No and no. To me, midwifery always included holistic health. Yeah, it went hand in hand. I saw like a home birth being a great way to. It was a normal biological process. So why would you need medicine unless you needed medicine? And that just made sense to me from the start. And my mom was very involved with natural health in the version of it, you know, in the mid-70s because she hadn't been able to get pregnant. And then help with a chiropractor restored her fertility. So she became pretty passionate about all that. He wanted to teach her about natural health. We really felt like the people on the outs. It's sort of like you describing home birth at first, right? It was. The relatives didn't get it, nobody got it. And I was a very passionate, you know, teenager about the topic. So nobody wants to be lectured about natural health from a teenager when it's weird. That's just craziness. So I always. I didn't see myself as, like, having a path of midwifery. Mine was probably one of the most organic, traditional types, right Where I became an apprentice after high school, and I thought I got into Harvard. Getting an apprenticeship to me was literally one of the most jeweled thrills of my life. I couldn't believe it that I would be this lucky to be around people who were and, you know, really kind of reclaiming the profession at the time because it had almost died out. And I got to be. I got to come of age with these really brave women. I always just hoped that I just. I was following my passion, and so I just kept following it. And so when people say to me, like, how do you get to be around pregnant ladies? I don't know how to tell you to do that. I would talk to every pregnant lady I stood next to in the grocery store. They were. I could not get close enough to pregnant ladies. I got done with a particular chapter of my life. I went out to New Mexico from Michigan, a friend of mine. And I would just literally picked it off of a big map on the floor and thought, let's go start there and do something different. And we went there, and I was. This is kind of personal, but I was in my late 20s, early 30s. I was starting to feel kind of distraught that I wasn't having babies. I was helping all these people have babies. And if the mom who was having her seventh wanted to let her teenager hold her baby before she did, I was invested. Like, I had feelings about it. I'm like, I know my job is to serve neutrally, to be a chameleon for everyone. And I wanted my own baby so much, and it wasn't my time, so I needed to do something else. So I left midwifery. My little CDs, like, oh, out in New Mexico. I was selling things, and there's a whole saga that goes with all that. But I was out there. And within four weeks, I was teaching a childbirth ed class. The thing I didn't want to do because people came in where I was working and they're pregnant. I talked to them, and they're like, oh, I Need a child. Oh, I love teaching. And all of a sudden, there was four couples who came to my living room, and I taught them childbirth ed. And two of them decided to have home births because it sounded like a good idea. And they got so empowered, and they invited me. You know, they got midwives there. I wasn't a fully empowered midwife at that point.
- [36:12]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah.
- [36:13]
Beth
You know, still sort of like a senior apprenticeship stage. And they invited me to the births. I have pictures of going to the births in 19, I don't know what, 90, you know, with people I had just met. So it's like our passion leads us.
- [36:28]
Unnamed Speaker
You've told me a quote before, and I'm not gonna remember it. And I don't even remember who said it, but it's something like, you know, when you say, I'm gonna do this thing, I'm gonna do it. That almost like the world.
- [36:39]
Beth
Oh, yes. It's a good. It's a quote from Goethe, like J, G, O, E, T, H, E. It's an amazing quote. And it basically says, I'm paraphrasing. It's such a gracious quote. I give the whole quote. I print it out and give it to people with their high school graduation cards because it's such an inspiration.
- [36:58]
Unnamed Speaker
This is a great time of year for this, then, because those parties are coming.
- [37:01]
Beth
Yeah.
- [37:01]
Jenny Urich
Yeah. Good idea.
- [37:02]
Beth
And it goes really well with the 50 things. You know, they can still go to the website and download the 50 things. But the punchline, if I were to paraphrase crudely, is that once you make the decision that when you decide to do something, you cannot even imagine how the universe will conspire to assist you in accomplishing that. I think that deciding matters. Right. I know that we're sort of all over in topics right now a little bit, because I just. It's the modeling.
- [37:27]
Jenny Urich
Yeah, right.
- [37:28]
Beth
And you were bringing that up before the modeling. How, you know, what did I do with midwifing? How could I teach other midwives? I think it's a lot about. We live our passions. We need to lean into our passions. We need to feel like model being uncomfortable in them. I stretched immigra free. I taught my kids that they needed to stretch. And parents, like, I see sometimes parents talking on your feeds, and they're like, I hate going outside. This is so hard. I'm trying to get, like, I got my kids the boots, and they won't go out. They don't like being outside.
- [37:58]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah.
- [37:58]
Beth
I was like, I know, honey. I'm really sorry. I don't mean to be. I don't mean to sound, you know, patrolistic, but.
- [38:03]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [38:03]
Beth
The truth is our kids are not going to go outside if we don't want to go outside. We have to model for them what it looks like to lean into life. And if we want to be on our phones, but we want our kids to eat the vegetables and go outside, that doesn't work.
- [38:16]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [38:17]
Beth
And so as a midwife, I feel like I have to model showing up. I have to model caring.
- [38:22]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [38:22]
Beth
I have to. I have to model for the grandparents at the home visit, what it looks like to care for their pregnant person. I have to model. You should be in bed. That's why I'm showing up. So in the windy March, you don't bring me your newborn out, I'm going to model that you deserve care. I'm going to do my best to listen. And if we want our kids to be strong people, we have to marshal our brave, is what I call it.
- [38:50]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah.
- [38:51]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [38:51]
Unnamed Speaker
So, and what's interesting, I guess back to that question, and then I want to move on, because you have this wonderful new resource called about evaluating your six kids. It's called Let me feel you're for it, which is such a wonderful name because, I mean, I think everyone relates to that little. That little phrase, you know, like, you grow up and you're like, I don't feel good. You know, grandma or mom or someone says, well, just let me feel your forehead. And everybody, I think, can relate with that, or a lot of people can, at least. But, you know, when you stepped into this realm of midwifery and, you know, helping babies to come into the world and helping women turn into mothers, you went beyond that. You went beyond that. And you. I feel emotional about this. You midwife the family. I don't know, because I don't know any other midwives, but I don't think that that is common. Maybe it is, but the fact that you are someone that a person could turn to and say, I mean, I feel like it could call you about anything. Was bullying. You know, it's. This situation seems a little off and what's your perspective? And. And also, here's a rash and, you know, or it's all of it. And I guess I just think, like, in this conversation about stretching, when you stretch, you just. You don't really know what direction it's gonna go. And I remember, I remember when someone asked me about being on my podcast, and I've told this story before. Like, I did have one technically, but I Hadn't boasted on it in a year and a half. I never interviewed anybody. I didn't know how to work it. I didn't know how to work the microphones. I didn't know about the equipment. And I did it. And I was so nervous, and I was so mad at myself for saying yes. I was so mad. I was out in the garden and I was, like, kicking myself. I was like, why in the world would I have said yes to interview this guy about this book? And then he got on and he said, none of my. In. None of. I don't even know how to word it. None of the interviews I've had and people have not. Nobody's asked me the questions that you're asking me, basically. And he said, this was the part of the book I had to argue with my editor to put in because it was about light and getting kids out in light. It was a book about sleep, kids in sleep. It was about light and circadian rhythm. And he said I had to push back on my editor and say, this is the part I want. I want to have this in the book. It's important. And you're the only one who's asked me about it. And here we sit. I mean, it's a. 450 episodes later, here you and I sit in your lovely home with this mobile setup, you know, that I hope is working well and also has some issues. The microphones we found out are too heavy. I mean, there's always, like. It's always a decide and iterate. Decide and iterate. So I just. I think that's what you've done. You're like, I'm showing up for these moms. I'm showing up for these babies. But in doing that, you've shown up for so much more. And I think that that's encouraging. I just. You know, sometimes we just share our stories, and it models to other people what it might look like down the road. And what it's probably gonna look like is more than you ever thought.
- [41:56]
Beth
Yes. You've also shared, Jenny, several times that many of your interviewees, you know, people you interview, tell you, none of the other people who interview me actually have read my book. Book.
- [42:08]
Unnamed Speaker
Right.
- [42:09]
Beth
So I think the takeaway is not that other people can't have Beth the midwife or be as brave as Ginny, you know who. You downplay things. But you are super smart. You want all kinds of stuff in school. You're, like, super smart. Advanced, skip grades, all that stuff. But the reality is that all of us can Read the book before the interview or whatever that means. In other words, all of us can listen to our friends. All of us can slow down when the child cries. All of us could listen to a 10 minute something podcast that uplifts us and helps us feel a little more brave and a little less lonely. And so I feel like, you know, you and I both teared up over this and we're just talking about stretching. You know, it's a pretty basic concept and we've covered it thoroughly, but the truth is you and I live by that note and we try and when we're feeling a little faltering about our current iteration of stretching, yeah, that's when we reach out. So I encourage people. You reach out. You reach out to your friend or your sister in law or your, your grown up kid who's turned out really well like I do. And sometimes I don't feel like I can reach out. I have clients. I don't, I don't. I'm really careful to not lean with a current client. Like, I might be friends outside of their birth, but the year they're having a baby, they get to lean like they get to be queen that year. And so spend a lot of time with my work and with my clients. I don't end up necessarily doing a lot of super social stuff necessarily. Your tour was a really big social moment for me. But that's where I do odd things. I go to the hardware store, the old fashioned one that has all the middle aged and retired guys in it, and I go there to get a key or I go there to pick out the right kind of something. I go there to get the salt for the stairs in the winter because I want contact with middle aged, older, calm guys. I don't get a lot in my business, you know, so I go to the hardware store and hang around and make dad jokes and so we can feed ourselves even if we don't have a magical person at this moment. There's lots of different ways and the sunshine and the outside do it. I believe it. I do it. Today, I did it, we needed it. And there's lots of other ways you're.
- [44:21]
Unnamed Speaker
Advocating for yourself in your moments of stretching. And the point is that when you stretch, when you choose to stretch, and you and I both believe that if the opportunity to stretch into something new is there, it's going to be more than you could expect in the long term. But that along the way there may be times where you need to lean in. And it is an interesting time in life. To do that because there are a lot of resources out there. We're having a really hard situation at a church that we were at, and there's podcasts about that and there's books about that, you know, power and abuse in the church and different things. And so I have had to personally spend hours of my own personal time reading these books and listening to these things that are giving me strength. And so I just think that's a really important part of this, is that when you stretch, there are times when you're also going to have to advocate for yourself in whatever way that looks. You're single, so you go to the hardware store, you know, and you just get that male energy or, you know, you step outside and you take a walk and you let that sun get on your forehead. Or, you know, you call up a close friend or you call up, you know, maybe you have a counselor or you have a coach or something like that, and you reach out to those people. You have to have that, I think, in order to continue to stretch.
- [45:35]
Beth
Yep.
- [45:36]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [45:40]
Beth
You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first.
- [45:53]
Jenny Urich
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- [46:37]
Beth
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- [46:54]
Unnamed Speaker
Okay, so let's, let's talk about one of the things that you have done, and I've been privy to be sort of front row seat to this, is that in your personal stretching, you did the midwife thing for decades and you're delivering babies and you're helping families and you start to make this shift in your life for a lot of reasons. One being that it's hard to drive through the middle of the night as you get older and be up all night and all of these different things.
- [47:20]
Jenny Urich
There's physical things that are going on.
- [47:22]
Unnamed Speaker
There's, you know, there's just different things that. The upheaval and schedule and. Does this feel too personal?
- [47:27]
Beth
No. I mean, it changes in the world. Anybody who's a part of birth knows this. The people who are being doulas, the people are being midwives. I. I was talking to someone who is a colleague of mine that helps me. Like, I have this one brilliant woman who's really helps me create these beautiful book, you know, ebooks and stuff. And she's an engineer by training. She has a photography background. All this stuff she's taught herself. And we were discussing our personalities and how we approached stuff, and I said, like, well, as a midwife, I have trouble with deadlines. Like, I don't really. I've never really. Like, I don't have hard deadlines. You know, my hard deadline is get my cool, skid the school on time, and they graduate high school. Those are my deadlines. Because I can go get a, you know, a whole flat of strawberries and plan to freeze them. And if somebody calls in labor, they all rot because it's not big enough. I bought a.
- [48:09]
Unnamed Speaker
And this is like an example of a story that actually happened. It probably happened 13 times.
- [48:13]
Beth
Like, I. My children are like, I. I said, I have to buy a huge. I want a big. A big refrigerator out in the garage. The kind that has one door, not two, and I need it to be wide. And they're like, you don't need another refrigerator. I'm like, I need one that has empty shelves for me to shove stuff on because I kept having food go bad. And that's. This is like a. All midwives know about this. Like, the food goes bad. You were gonna eat it, you were gonna cook it, you were gonna do it thawed, and you forgot to put it away when you ran out of the door. We're always okay.
- [48:38]
Unnamed Speaker
This is a really interesting. I like this topic a lot. So many topics. But people love these episodes. They ask for you to come back all the time. I think that's a really interesting thing, though, to say that when you stretch, there are costs that occur that you don't expect. You didn't expect that. You know, when you're 16, 17, 18, starting to go to these births, you don't expect that at some point my. I'm gonna lose food. You know, just, you know, based off of the nature of the job. And so I think.
- [49:05]
Jenny Urich
I mean, that's.
- [49:06]
Unnamed Speaker
That's.
- [49:06]
Beth
Oh, here's one for you.
- [49:08]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [49:08]
Beth
Home birth midwives, they wear out cars before they can pay them off. I do 30,000 miles a year. So you buy a used minivan because, you know, it looks like your people are paying a bunch of money, but there's all these other places the money goes out. You. They don't realize that I'm paying Uber to take my kids to school sometimes.
- [49:22]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [49:23]
Beth
Or paying for child care for overnight. How much do you pay for that when they're little or whatever? So, you know, you. You buy a used minivan because you have a bunch of kids and you're doing your thing, and. And then you put 90, 000 miles on it. So you got it at 120. You sell it or you can't. And then you have 200. Then you have 200 something. And it's like, okay, so it's okay, I'm not winning. It's just. It's part of, like, behind the scenes. Right? So maybe that's what we're trying to acknowledge is that, hey, there's always behind the scenes, you know, and that's kind of a. It's becoming more in now, right, to say, like, well, you know, on social media, it's not all beautiful. People just post the beautiful stuff, you know, and it's not.
- [50:04]
Unnamed Speaker
It's not. And I mean, that's one of the things that we've always. I mean, you and I are like that. I've always been like that. I'm like, here, let me tell you. I'm like, you know, we struggle with our marriage. My house is a mess. Like, you know, there are. There are definitely messy parts to all of it. And also, I think that's okay. I think that that's another thing that needs to be acknowledged, is that nobody has all of these things all together. And so if you're stretching in an area that you feel like you're passionate about, it is okay for some other things to drop for a period or a season or for a long time. So as a midwife, okay, so you're out.
- [50:34]
Jenny Urich
You're doing this.
- [50:34]
Unnamed Speaker
You can't make plans. I mean, we've been friends in on both sides of it. It's like, can't make plans, it gets canceled. You know, you miss Christmas. You miss Christmas. We've talked about that in one of our episodes.
- [50:44]
Jenny Urich
And.
- [50:44]
Unnamed Speaker
And you miss Christmas morning. And so all of these different types of things. And so you've Started to after catching babies. And do you say catching babies after helping moms get babies, whatever.
- [50:57]
Beth
No. Midwives say they catch babies mostly to keep the power with the mom who we feel like delivers the baby.
- [51:02]
Unnamed Speaker
Yes.
- [51:02]
Beth
You know, so people are more familiar with the word deliver. And I, I'm less attached than I was politically a long time ago. But I do believe that women do the work and we show up to help them.
- [51:11]
Unnamed Speaker
You know, but so you're. So you do that for decades and you start to make this shift into taking what you have spent your life doing, which is not just helping moms deliver their babies. It is helping with holistic health care and life care, really, from pregnancy all the way through end of life. This is what you talked about. Yeah, the continuum. It's like a continuum of care through all of the seasons of life that we find ourselves in. And I've been here with the front row seat as you started to make this shift, which I think is really brave to say. I've written all these manuals, I've written all these things in the past. I've taught all these classes, but they've only been to a small portion of people. And I want to start to take this information out into the world. And so you have this course that you have where it's called get well soon. And it's like this is all the information that you want because you can't get into the doctor's office at Friday at 8pm when your kid is throwing up and you don't know all that. So you have this get well soon course that's available. You're working on a childbirth ed course. You're starting to take it all and you're putting out these wonderful things, Even just the 5050 things, I hope you know, that would be an example of like, do you have a vision for your child in the years that they're growing up in your home? It's been wonderful to see. And you have a new thing out that's free. Yeah, that's free. It's a webinar. But you also get this wonderful booklet with it, and this one is called let me feel your forehead.
- [52:41]
Jenny Urich
So I'm going to throw a transition in here so that people know what just happened. So, first of all, I was stretching and using a new setup where we can do a podcast on the go. I I learned about this from Neil Passricha I to Toronto to interview him for his podcast called Three Books, which is a phenomenally cool podcast. And we recorded the podcast while we were walking around outside. And he had this little system in his backpack and these microphone cords snaked out of it. And I thought, oh, that's fantastic. If you can do podcasts on the go, and we travel for different conferences, I could talk to someone, you know, while I'm there, or. Or something like that. So you are my guinea pig today. Come over and try it. So we got. So we're talking, talking, talking, talking. Thank goodness you were recording it on your phone. Talking, talking, talking. All of a sudden, I look down at this little box, and it's off. What happened? And it had just run out of batteries. It was supposed to last for six hours, apparently. So now we have that plugged in, and we've spent a long time. We spent about an hour and a half trying to get the video from your phone to my phone. So some. The audio is going to be all sorts of different things, but we have a really gracious audience. People are so wonderful.
- [53:49]
Beth
It's stretching.
- [53:51]
Jenny Urich
Yeah, we're stretching.
- [53:52]
Beth
You know, we're stretching, but it gave us a time that we don't have, which is time to connect. And it's been good, personally, so that it was. We'll get through it. It's like it happens at birth, too, all the time, right? You know, you're like, oh, the contractions are happening. Let's go. Okay, we're there, we're there. Oh, the contractions aren't happening. Oh, do we leave?
- [54:10]
Unnamed Speaker
Leave?
- [54:11]
Beth
Do we stay?
- [54:12]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [54:13]
Beth
Should we nudge. Should we be quiet? Like. Oh, it's.
- [54:16]
Jenny Urich
Yeah. There's a lot of uncertainties, aren't there? Yeah. In life and when. And when you're stretching. So.
- [54:21]
Beth
And in parenting. Yeah, Parenting always does this.
- [54:24]
Jenny Urich
Yeah. Well, we wanted to sort of wrap it up with this thought of stretching in the way that you care for your children. And so I had an. I remember my first stretching. It actually took quite a while, I think. I can't remember how old our oldest was at this point, but, you know, maybe six or something like that. This was my first experience with it. And we had gone. Josh traveled a lot for work when our kids were younger, and we had gone to one of our favorite spots. It's at Proud Lake State Recreation Area here in Michigan. So if you're someone from Michigan, it's a wonderful place to go. It's pine forest, and there's this little river that you can swim in. It's shallow, a fantastic. But you gotta hike back to it. It's like, you know, not super far, but you know how it is. You Got three kids. Everyone was in, you know, life jackets at the time as Josh is gone, food for everyone, diapers, changes of clothes, bathing suits, all this stuff, towels. And we're there. And all of a sudden our oldest just started to scream that his ear was hurting. I mean, and it was just like the big screams. It wasn't just like, a little, I'm uncomfortable. And he started to scream to take him to the hospital. And I was like, well, first of all, we have to pack up all our stuff here. We got to walk back to the car. I've got to load it all in. I've got the stroller. If you're a mom with young kids, you totally get it. Like, you.
- [55:38]
Beth
You.
- [55:38]
Jenny Urich
I mean, babies on my back, like, the whole thing. And I got in the car and he's, like, wailing. And so I called you and I said, he's. He wants me to take him to the hospital. I've got the kids with me. His ears hurting. And this is what you said, and in your Beth voice. Well, if you take them to the hospital, what are some things that they might offer you? And you started to go sort of go through this list of questions. Well, they might offer you Tylenol, you know, these types of things. You said, if you take him home, these are some things that you can try. And I made it home and took some of the ideas that you have that are in your get well soon course, which is a phenomenal resource to have. It's worth its weight in gold if, you know, use it for the whole childhood. And we were able to do some different natural remedies, and he was completely fine in about an hour.
- [56:26]
Beth
So, wait, that's a big deal.
- [56:27]
Jenny Urich
Yes.
- [56:28]
Beth
Like, what you just said is incomprehensible a lot of the time. And of course, it's not always such a great story, but we tried a few things that I had at my house. You weren't particularly naturally minded, by the way, at the time, you were, you know, still gathering stuff. And in about an hour, he was doing a lot better.
- [56:45]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [56:46]
Beth
What would we pay for that? You know what I mean?
- [56:48]
Jenny Urich
Right. And at the hospital, they may not have even seen him in an hour. And I would have had all the kids there. And that's okay. I mean, if that's what you need to do, Obviously, that's what you do. You take all of your kids there and you do what you need to do. But it was sort of the first time that it really clicked for me that I had more agency than I realized and you talk about. And you talk about it, and get well soon. You talk about the toolbox. And that's when, for me, I started to build my toolbox of things that I could use at home. And I want to throw out one other little piece before we dive in, because you have get well soon now you've added on, and you have another opportunity for parents to learn some information. This one is a free webinar. But when you start to build your toolbox, and I think that this is a piece that nobody really thinks about, you build your toolbox for the sake of helping your kids, but you also build your toolbox so that you can be a piece of the generational puzzle that right now is missing. In my particular case, I had you to call, but that's only because I'd had two C sections and needed a midwife so that I didn't have any more C sections. I believe it's God brought us together. But in some ways, it was happenstance. It's possible I never would have had a Beth to call.
- [57:58]
Beth
Yeah.
- [57:58]
Jenny Urich
But I did have a Beth to call. And so now I can be the person. And people do.
- [58:03]
Beth
Yes.
- [58:04]
Jenny Urich
People text me a lot of things with a lot of questions, and occasionally I think that they're doing it with the ulterior motive that I'm gonna ask you.
- [58:12]
Beth
You had.
- [58:13]
Jenny Urich
Yes. And I have done that. And then sometimes I do know the answer. And so I feel like by me building my toolbox now, I'm able to be that link for the younger moms, and I will be able to be that for our own children. So you do get well soon, and you just have so much information and so many resources that you came out with something new just recently. Can you tell us about it?
- [58:35]
Beth
Yes. So I tried. I stretched into doing my very first webinar. Yes. And it's pretty and it's good. And, you know, like, everything that you do the first time, it feels different, you know?
- [58:46]
Unnamed Speaker
Right.
- [58:46]
Beth
But it's available for a free thing. You just sign up and it's on demand. So I've invented the On Demand webinar because mothers never have exactly at 12:05 ready.
- [58:56]
Unnamed Speaker
Right.
- [58:56]
Beth
Who knows? So. But it has a free download that goes with it, which is what we wanted to talk about. And the free download is called let me feel your forehead. So the. The webinar is, you know, how to evaluate your sick kids. There ended up being so many questions from moms about, like, oh, what should I do next? Because I'm really, really scared.
- [59:12]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [59:12]
Beth
And they would call because we had this relationship that I realized that we had this gap. And so I did a free webinar. It's called how to evaluate your sick kids. So that people could really kind of get in their minds. Like, here's. You can ask them questions, like the questions that I talked to you about with earache. So that we've. We've done before. And then we. I made a download. So the download is what we're going to talk about. It kind of goes together. The webinar is on demand, so it's really handy for moms.
- [59:37]
Jenny Urich
And it comes with the download, which is free.
- [59:40]
Beth
Yeah, the download's free. All this stuff is free.
- [59:42]
Jenny Urich
This is a phenomenal resource.
- [59:44]
Beth
And you get a coupon, like a really juicy coupon for the get well soon if you want it.
- [59:48]
Jenny Urich
So this is a big download and full of wonderful, wonderful information. So for the people who are like, I really want to be rubbing shoulders with your midwife, you're starting to put out opportunity after opportunity for ways that they can. They can download the webinar. They can do get well soon. They can get that. There's so much. And there's more coming, too.
- [60:08]
Beth
There's a lot more coming. I mean, I'm getting direct messages every week from people who say, I started following you a year ago. This pregnancy was completely different. We had the most amazing outcome. It's like, really puts me in tears a couple times a week. And I'm so grateful that somehow doing reels and putting out a newsletter and making up a bunch of blogs because. And it's creating a bank of information that now the doulas can just refer their clients to, like, oh, no, you need this information. But here, here's a good way. So, you know, it's like, in social media, you're supposed to pick a niche and walk your line. And so it's like, I always got the question, are you gonna do midwifery? Are you gonna be natural health? That's where this wandering conversation of, like, I see it as all together. If I can help a mom feel more naturally healthy and stronger and build an immune system, she'll have a better pregnancy. She'll be more confident, so her anxiety will be down. So that. That influences the growing of her baby.
- [61:01]
Jenny Urich
Yes, it's a continuum of care. And I was talking to someone recently who was a grandmother, and she said, what I didn't realize is that all along I was raising parents for my grandkids. I thought that was really powerful. Like, this is the situation is that, like, that's what I'm saying. It's like, well, now that I have some tools that I didn't used to have, you know, I was like a Hot Pockets eater and that type of thing. Like, as I build my toolbox, then I'm able to pass those on to my kids and to future generations that I don't know yet. And so this is a really important thing to consider is learning this type of information and having a chance to try it out and that type of thing. So let's talk about Let Me Feel youl Forehead, which is the download.
- [61:44]
Beth
I view this, frankly as a way of helping pregnant women, of helping mothers in general, of helping any, any family member. You don't have to be that. But it's just, it, it's fallen out of common knowledge how to capably handle the everyday illnesses that come up in every family all the time, and how to handle them at home. It's not that you have to always stay home or there's a better or worse, but it's almost like it's not that we can't or shouldn't. Right. People I talk to young mothers who are reading the Internet and they feel like that they might get in trouble if they don't take a fever to the pediatrician right away. It's like, well, if your child needs your pediatrician, you should for sure go, you know. But we're allowed to evaluate fevers. Like that's a. That's a mom's job. But it's kind of gotten out of. It's gotten out of favor. Right. So the truth is, is that illnesses are less severe and they tend to be less frequent when families can. Are empowered to just treat things promptly at home and have a set of tools they can work with. And if I can help my maternity clients have a little more confidence, they now have child safe stuff that they can take so they can minimize their illnesses, their anxiety. Stone. If I can help them, for instance, deal with their children more capably and more comfortably, my pregnant clients will sleep better. They're gonna have less swelling the next day. Like, I literally see this as the really bigger picture.
- [63:00]
Jenny Urich
And can you talk about, you know, you and I have had these conversations just a little bit, and I'm having them with you, but I'm also having them with a lot of people, people who work with people, psychiatrists and psychologists and people who work with people. And they talk about how we are seeing a change and people who work with people and who have for decades.
- [63:20]
Beth
Right.
- [63:20]
Jenny Urich
And I think it's very important. Important that we know about some of those changes. And so one of the things that you talked about and are talking about more recently is you have seen mothers that are very overwhelmed because there's so much information out there, and this generational piece is fairly lost in the mix. There isn't anyone to call. Can you talk about just. Even before we hop into some of these ideas, like how do we navigate that situation of just there being such an onslaught of information and often the information is such contradictory.
- [63:51]
Beth
Yeah. I'm not sure how to generally help people. You're talking to somebody who. It's no secret that I wasn't much of a social media person. Right. And I. And I didn't really indulge in the phones in the beginning and stuff. And when I go to make a real now or my Monday Mythbusters and stuff where I kind of challenge some of the status quo, I go researching to see what the current thought is. Right. What a. Well, if you research this and you're just a regular person, what comes up? And quite frequently, I find very inaccurate information that I know to be inaccurate, both from science and studies and my own career. And I see it being promoted as authoritative. Like, I'm enough. Like, I'm reading, like, oh, I could take something from here. And then I start to read the content. I'm like, this content's wrong.
- [64:35]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [64:35]
Beth
I just did a real. On what to expect when you're expecting.
- [64:39]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [64:39]
Beth
Where I just threw a fit, basically, because it's everybody's book. It has a lot of authority. Turned out that it's produced by the, you know, the obstetric business. And it is a. It is distributed for obese to give out for free.
- [64:53]
Jenny Urich
I didn't know that.
- [64:54]
Beth
The information is really disempowering and people have, like. It's one of my, like, people just, like, can't stop talking about it. You know, they suggest that if you're having a baby too fast at home that you should position yourself on a bed at the end. And if you can't do that, you should be on the couch with your bottom off the end and your feet on the ottoman so that your baby could fall down in the crack between there because you need to have her off the edge. Oh, they're having people imitate obese.
- [65:18]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [65:18]
Beth
Which is, like, not best practice there either. That's a different topic. I can go off forever.
- [65:21]
Jenny Urich
We'll do that. But we're going to do that topic because we're going to be talking about Birth. We have all sorts of ideas for everyone who loves Beth. We just brainstormed in the amount of.
- [65:29]
Unnamed Speaker
Hour and a half that it took.
- [65:31]
Jenny Urich
To figure out our sound and give videos from one to the next. We rainstormed podcast ideas. Really? Through the end of the year, we've got a lot of ideas.
- [65:38]
Beth
We'll have some fun.
- [65:39]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [65:39]
Beth
And it'll be great to bring everyone along. So we're going to go back to taking care of our kids ourselves. Can be a bit of a stretch if it's brand new. And if we're saying like, where do you look? I would say, like, ask questions of your source. Just because they have a really beautiful podcast or on, you know, or a really beautiful website doesn't mean that they know what they're doing. And I've found that a lot of people don't walk their talk. You can compare. That's why I frankly am trying to produce some really high quality information that people can lean into. That simple. It's not that I'm the only great voice. There's a lot of great voices out there, obviously.
- [66:10]
Jenny Urich
But you are the greatest voice. I do want to throw that out there, though. I mean, because you have decades of experience and because you didn't just deliver the baby and then go. You walked alongside families for decades. So this is a different type of wisdom that's coming out because you lived it, you walked it, you walked it with your own children and then you've been helping families for 40 plus years. And so there is a depth of wisdom there that puts your voice in a very top tier of people.
- [66:42]
Beth
You're so kind to say that. I mean, the reality is that a lot of what I share I did not pluck from air. I learned it from mothers who learned it because they researched their. They had really third generation doctors they were working with, they had a grandma who still knew, and then I would try it out. So mainly what I have is a trial and error in addition to modern research and, you know, things like that. I'm not infallible, by the way. Like, this is not medical advice. You should always use your common sense. You should always be at the head of your healthcare team. You should never do something that doesn't feel exactly right to you for a lot of good reasons and all your practical reasons, just because you think I said it. I'm not that level of authority. What I want to do is I want to empower people to ask questions, look closely and know that there's a few small things you can do. You Might need to go to the ER or urgent care for an ear. But what if you were able to do something along the way? So for that half hour ride that you get caught in traffic, it's coming down.
- [67:33]
Jenny Urich
Right, Right. So the ER is part of the toolbox. I think that's the whole point is there's a part of the toolbox. What about. And I sure there I know that there are moms that are listening and the world has definitely it's more into like this life hacking thing and people are doing all sorts of things to, to be healthier and we're doing that with our kids. I think that there's great information out there now about like the seed oils and the food dyes and getting outdoors and full spectrum light. But healthy kids sometimes do get sick.
- [67:59]
Beth
Yeah, that's actually what. Let me feel your forehead and how to evaluate your sick kids is all about. If this is an unfamiliar territory and people are trying to get their information up and their confidence up. Right. So that they can minimize medical visits if they want to, they feel like they can take better care of their kids. They have more choices, they have more options. We saw with the Pandemic, you know, there were times that even if you wanted to be using the pediatrician primarily, it wasn't as available. So it really makes sense to have some skill sets at home. And you were right. The Let Me Feel youl Forehead came from my mom, who was the quintessential. She'd put her hand on my, like, I don't feel well, I don't wanna go to school. And she'd put her hand on my forehead and she would declare me well enough for school or sick enough for bed. Yeah, it's like, okay. And I've asked people like, oh, you're out camping, you don't have a. You don't have a thermometer with you and you're nervous. Like, okay, so what do you think the fever is? How would I know? Well, put your hand on their head. Is it really hot? You know, like, you get used to kids. Like, you can tell. Like, oh, that's a little bit of a heat. That's a really hot heat that scorches my hand. That kind of gets my heart going. I'm not talking about being casual or inattentive. I'm not talking about not doing your job, you know, to notice.
- [69:09]
Jenny Urich
But you're talking about how this is how life goes. Sometimes you are at a campground and it's the middle of the night and you forgot your first aid kit. Or you, you don't have a thermometer with you. And so this is another reason why just having good experiences of working with your toolbox can be helpful long term.
- [69:28]
Beth
Yeah. So the idea, the toolbox is sort of like your natural medicine chest. Everybody has their. We've talked about it before, I think, but, like, everybody has a toolbox. The plumber has a toolbox, the dentist has a toolbox. Moms have a toolbox. That's what our diaper bag is. Right. So we use the tools we're most comfortable with. So the issue becomes, what kind of a toolbox do you have to address everyday illnesses? Because they're gonna keep coming up. Kids get sore throats, they get fevers, we puke, things happen. And what we teach people is each care provider also has a toolbox. Urgent care tends to have a toolbox that's mostly pharmaceutical.
- [70:00]
Jenny Urich
Right.
- [70:00]
Beth
They could do breathing treatments, they could do steroids, they could do antibiotics, is one they turn to quite a bit. And if you have a broken leg, starting with urgent care or the ER is definitely a good idea.
- [70:12]
Jenny Urich
The mom is not going to have the toolbox for the broken leg or the tool in the toolbox for the broken leg.
- [70:17]
Beth
That's what I try to do, is give help. People go through a series of questions to see how bad is it and to bring their common sense into it. Because moms and dads, they're always evaluating how their kid is. You actually have a lot more information than you imagine going into this. And that way it can help you discern. Well, I don't know. Should I go to urgent care in the middle of the night? Well, what would they be offering? And is it the thing that you think you want?
- [70:42]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [70:43]
Beth
So, for example, I usually start with questions like, is there anything really serious happening right now? I'm like, are they breathing? And people, like, often, like, chuckle like, yeah, like, is any part blue? And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, if they're not oxygenating well, their lips, their mucous membranes, the nail beds of their fingers, they're not going to be pink like they're supposed to. They're like, oh, no, they're breathing really well. Oh, good. We're not having to run out the. We're not hanging up.
- [71:13]
Jenny Urich
Right.
- [71:13]
Beth
Okay, good. So what about the next thing? Right, so we go through a whole series of questions and the kind of data that people are collecting, they're noticing if their kid has been sleeping more. They notice if they're agitated, they notice if they are not eating the same, they might notice about the outputs different. Right. With your little kids, you know, you're changing diapers or the little ones are getting your help in the bathroom room. Are they having a lot more output? A lot less output? Do they not eat the way they usually do?
- [71:41]
Jenny Urich
I love this. I want to tell you, I love this because I was telling you earlier in our break, I had a podcast with these women called the Radical Moms Union and people really liked it. I got a lot of feedback on it and it was about sort of this corporate push to separate moms and babies. I love these questions because they just validate the mom who is close by and the mom who would know the answers to these questions. Have you noticed a change in the nature of their crying? How are their energies as compared to usual? It's just to me, it's like, it's that reminder that you're right where you need to be.
- [72:17]
Beth
Yeah. This information is available to every parent. Your child can be in extended daycare or after school care.
- [72:24]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [72:24]
Beth
And you still know that when you pick them in, pick them up, if they climb into their car seat and settle back and like look really saggy when they're usually chattering away like a chipmunk. Oh, big like, oh, your antenna goes up. Right. You have an idea. All of this information is always available. It actually is credible and important information. And again, I. It's like one of my soapbox pieces is that as a parent, you must always be at the head of your child's healthcare team, that you know things that no one else could possibly know, that must be integrated into the picture of the, of the healthcare. It doesn't mean you don't need expertise or other help or medicine or whatever. It just means you're the ringleader, you understand the bigger picture. So. So, for instance, maybe it's just that there's family circumstances that you could shift, Right. Maybe if there's a circumstance like, you know, you've been having holidays, there's been tons of sugar, nobody's been napping the same, and you just need a down day and you might be able to save yourself the illness. One of my sons, I noticed after a couple times his dad and I were struggling and if we had a fight pretty quickly, the six year old would have a fever. Like that same day he, all of a sudden there'd be, he'd have a fever for 24 hours. And I noticed this pattern and I thought, oh, you know, like it weighs so heavily on you because you're trying to do everything right. And you obviously don't want to expose your kids to difficulties. But I started to notice, oh, he wasn't sick. That was his body's processing. That's how he worked through some emotion. That's where he worked with anxiety or, like, whatever he was feeling. So I. It changed our adult behavior, and the fever stopped.
- [74:00]
Jenny Urich
Wow. So it's just about noticing. I think that that's. That's an empowering message, is to notice. And like you said, it can be in any type of situation, whatever your parenting situation is. But I just feel like there is this cultural message to separate. You know, there's a lot of push toward it. And I'm not talking necessarily about daycare or not daycare or anything even like that. It's just like.
- [74:23]
Beth
Well, it's about outsourcing.
- [74:24]
Jenny Urich
Yeah. And it's fine to be attentive. It's just so looked down on to be like, maybe, you know, a mom that's there and present and noticing and all of those types of things. And, you know, like, that's like, that snu. I think, is a great example.
- [74:38]
Beth
Well, that's outsourcing.
- [74:40]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [74:40]
Beth
In other words, it's outsourcing on mothers. We're like, babies shouldn't be so attached. They. We shouldn't have to carry them so much. We shouldn't, you know, like, that's too much attachment. But we know the babies need it. So we're gonna spend $1,800 on an automatic bassinet that can fake the baby out.
- [74:56]
Jenny Urich
And the automatic bassinet is not gonna notice a change in crying. But when your baby is with you, it gives you more opportunity. That's what I'm saying. I think these questions are just like a reassurance.
- [75:06]
Beth
Yeah.
- [75:07]
Jenny Urich
That mothers are meant to be there, you know, and to notice.
- [75:11]
Beth
And I don't mean if you have your snoo and you love your snoop. We love you too. The takeaway is that connection is valuable.
- [75:19]
Jenny Urich
Yes.
- [75:20]
Beth
To mothers and babies and families and dads, you know, whoever's in the family, the extended family. And that that connection is actually part of a. Both healing and evaluation and keeping safe and is part of the whole.
- [75:32]
Jenny Urich
Yes. Okay, so that's. That's really where I was going with it. I probably botched all of the wording. That connection is part of healthcare. And when corporations try and convince you to disconnect in whatever way that is. Which is not like you said. I mean, you use a snoo for a little bit because you gotta hop in the Shower. I mean, there's all these different things, but if you're being sort of pushed toward disconnection, it's just a wonderful reminder that connection helps you to answer all of these different questions.
- [76:01]
Beth
Yes. So in this. Let me feel your forehead, which is something. I don't know. I think it's like 11, 12, 13 pages, something like that. It's filled with all these different kinds of questions and the subtext of them. And also things like what's their temperature? And the information that fever is nearly always the body's response to overcoming illness, but it's not the illness itself.
- [76:23]
Jenny Urich
Right.
- [76:23]
Beth
And so that if you can let your child, for instance, be warm without suppressing the fever, it can really be helpful in a lot of ways. One is that you will have accurate information about the state of their illness. Another is that your child might actually act more sick because they're gonna feel lousy. Right?
- [76:41]
Jenny Urich
Right. The fever is meant to keep you in bed, so you kinda sleep.
- [76:44]
Beth
And the fever is trying to actually get the body hot enough, which helps to kill some of the pathogens. But if we suppress the fever and then now the child doesn't remember that they feel sick.
- [76:52]
Jenny Urich
Right.
- [76:53]
Beth
They feel better, which is a natural thing. But what do they do? Then they're back to jumping off the couch.
- [76:58]
Jenny Urich
Right.
- [76:58]
Beth
When really they're actually needing to summon this energy in order to work on their immune system instead. And that actually laying low. And that's. And that's a lot about. What I get into with get well soon too is actually discussing the healing space, how we create that, the healing time. How do. How do we work with illness? How do we as parents feel comfortable with illness or not comfortable? And so in the webinar, you get some great little chunks because we took fever as an example and really not only went through all of these questions in great detail, but we went through what to do about fevers. So it's not even. It's only a fraction of what's in the get well soon big extensive course that you, like, covers everything. But it covers like a. Here's what one homeopathic can do. Here's what an herb could do for that. Here's what the onion in your refrigerator in your kitchen can do. Like, a whole selection of things so that you have, like, no, like, your tool, but your toolbox will be expanded just from this free download. But it also opens up the picture. Like, wow, what if you had a few of each of these categories in your natural toolbox for everything, all the regular stuff and What I'm discovering is that just like you mentioned earlier, my clients are even just people I've never met. The subscribers who got this course, they're sending me notes about how not only did they have an idea what to do, like somebody put, like, the cough remedies on the refrigerator so her husband could access them because they were also sick. And she goes, that really helped. We were all. We really got through a lot faster than usual. And that it increases our confidence for handling the next thing.
- [78:28]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [78:29]
Beth
I remember with you, after that thing with Jackson, there was a.
- [78:32]
Jenny Urich
That changed my whole life.
- [78:32]
Beth
It changed everything. And then at one point you called me because there was a whole nother matter.
- [78:37]
Jenny Urich
Yeah. It was right when Covid was starting and it was.
- [78:41]
Beth
And you were worried about going. There's all the complications that went with that. And you actually solved a problem that the ER misdiagnosed.
- [78:49]
Jenny Urich
Oh, yeah, that was a whole different thing. We had a nursemaid's elbow situation and spent. Oh, I called you on the way. Yeah, I remember I was in North Carolina, screaming. And they didn't do any. They weren't able to help her. Which that was an interesting. That's an interesting story in and of itself because I think that there is this belief that you will get help no matter what. And they could not figure out what was wrong with her. They X rayed, X rayed her arm, different positions, screaming her head off. She was 1 years old. And Josh figured it out through YouTube that it was nursemaid's elbow. And then she did end up getting that a couple other times. I think some kids are more prone to it than others, and we were able to fix it at home each time. But that's an interesting piece of the puzzle, that people are infallible and you may not necessarily get the answer that you're hoping for. And I think even with my births, I felt like, and we're going to be talking about, we're going to do a birth one. But you know that my birth. My actual birthing time, whatever you would say that is, you know, they got shorter. And as these home births happened and I started to learn, like, oh, these natural things really are helping me in making a difference. Like what these people are messaging you, you know, on different social media or sending you emails. And I think then you. That is very, very empowering.
- [80:04]
Beth
Yeah. Well, you can use it in any setting. I spent a lot of time on the. Connecting with one of my past clients who lives way, way out of state now. And when her kids got sick with all the stuff, it triggered some other issues that had been laying dormant. And she found herself in the hospital for a couple days with one and then a couple days with the next. It was really tough. And she was able to use all the stuff from our time as a midwife about asking questions and informed consent and how to do it. And she was the one. She actually found what the hospital missed. She's like, she. She said, no, you need to look in this. This corner. And they're like, oh, it can't be that. She goes, you need. Here's why. My family history. I know this. I know this. And she was exactly right and caused quite a shakeup in the medical setting. But she was able to use. She described, you know, using the holistic stuff to increase the stability and to speed the stability in the medical setting and to also make her feel more comfortable.
- [80:59]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [80:59]
Beth
And, you know, and, like, it actually helped quite a bit to expand them.
- [81:03]
Jenny Urich
Yeah. So you have this question in here, and I just want to explain. So for people who are listening, you would get this download. Let me feel your forehead. And then there's the webinar. But it basically almost is like walking through. If you were able to call a midwife, if you had this relationship where.
- [81:17]
Beth
You guys don't do this, this would be called. But this is called back.
- [81:20]
Jenny Urich
This is called Beth.
- [81:21]
Beth
Or call your holistic friend.
- [81:24]
Jenny Urich
Yes. Who. Oh, your holistic friend who is not just holistic, but like, has a ton of knowledge or maybe has gone to some schooling for it or someone who really knows, or back in the day.
- [81:33]
Beth
Who has two more kids than you.
- [81:34]
Jenny Urich
Yeah. And they. And they would start to go. Go through this checklist of why are they lethargic, you know, these types of things. And I love one of these questions, and I hope I didn't interrupt and you're probably going somewhere, but what is your common sense and intuition telling you? And I think a lot of people in this day and age, and myself included in a lot of different realms would be like, well, I don't have any. I have none. I have no common sense or intuition. And I do think that kind. Like how we kind of talked about that part of it is building that.
- [82:04]
Beth
Yes. And that's what this list is for. So even though it's, like, totally free and everything, the whole point is to help build some of those muscles. Right. Because if one of the questions is, now that the illness has your attention, what's the big picture? Has it been building for a while or does it appear to have an abrupt cause and are the precipitating events. Were you just at Thanksgiving two days ago and now everybody, they called you to let you know everyone's sick in the house that you were just at, you know, like, like what's in like, oh, oh yeah. You know, is everybody sick at school? Oh, I think that these questions, some of them are really simple, you know, but I think that especially for the people who feel really uneasy about trusting their intuition.
- [82:44]
Jenny Urich
Yes.
- [82:45]
Beth
It kind of just gives them through a thing. And I point out at the end, either from, at the end of these questions, you're going to be having a sense of things. You're. And I even go through a checklist of like, well now what do you do? So, you know, like, I think at the end here we talk about am I comfortable with a child taking a nap or going to sleep tonight? Oh, no, I'm not. Oh, well then maybe you should go get care.
- [83:06]
Jenny Urich
Right, right.
- [83:07]
Beth
And you have, you'll start to build a picture like, oh, I think I'm comfortable to the next checkpoint. Like the next time they wake up, I'm doing their temperature. But if they sleep through the night, maybe I won't bother them. I'm that comfortable. You're either going to be feeling a lot more roulette, like, okay, I'm just going to watch or oh no, I think this is better than I thought. Or you'll start to realize, oh no, we're. Because kids have a lot more Runway at the beginning of an illness. Right. You know, if they haven't, if they're not medically fragile or something. But if it's at the end, if it's the third round as we point out.
- [83:35]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [83:36]
Beth
And now you're sick too. Your capacity to be aware is compromised. Right. And you might end up using more aggressive medical techniques or visiting the doc or doing something even more than you might normally. I had a new baby and my 2 year old started to have febrile seizures kind of out of nowhere.
- [83:54]
Jenny Urich
Those are so scary, those febrile seizures. We had it with one kid.
- [83:58]
Beth
Yeah, yeah, I, I knew about it, I taught about it. I watched my mom handle it with my baby brother. But it scared the crap out of me.
- [84:05]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [84:05]
Beth
And then there was a point where I had like a four month old and he was about to do this again and I was out of sleep, my husband was out of town doing gigs and I just didn't have any capacity. I was so scared of waking up at three in the morning with a seizing child. Like I, I just didn't think I. I would manage it safely and emotionally. I was feeling kind of a wreck. Right. Like you do at some points. And so I gave my child. I probably gave him Tylenol.
- [84:28]
Jenny Urich
Yeah, sure.
- [84:29]
Beth
You know, or baby aspirin or something. I gave him. And. And it's like the kind of thing that I was like, against doing if I didn't have to. And I was like, well, that was the best why in the road. So that's part of what I'd like to teach to people, too, throughout the courses is, you know, you make the best decision that you can. You make not feel like using medications and labor. But after three days of a posterior baby, maybe that's a really wise use of a tool. Right. Or maybe you. Anyway, it can vary wildly. So in that case, I think that.
- [84:56]
Jenny Urich
This point that you brought up is a really good one. You know, when you think about your child being sick and not totally knowing what to do, One of the pieces that you talk about and let me feel youl forehead is your health, the state of your health. I don't think anybody would ever talk about that. You know, it's like how the state of your health might affect to the situation. And I think that's really important. And that's. That's part of Let me feel your forehead, which is how are you? And then, you know, you may have to get some extra help, some extra hands on or that is a variable in the situation here that I don't think anybody else really is talking about.
- [85:29]
Beth
Yeah, I don't think that pediatricians bring it up.
- [85:31]
Jenny Urich
No, no, they don't. Yeah. So. And I wouldn't have thought about it as a piece of the puzzle, but I. I do think I like that it's in there. I think this would be a really cool thing to do with your friends. You have a group of friends. You're at mops. Do you have a group of friends in your neighborhood? Do you have a group of friends through your school? I think, like, hey, why don't we take this webinar together? Let's get together and have some good cheese and crackers and whatever you, you know, you do with your friends and, you know, grab a some brownies or whatever, like, get together with your friends one evening for an hour and yeah, let's do the webinar together so that the people that are in our circle have a similar toolbox and then we can start to sort of help each other in a generational way. I think in the past it was like, people would help you know, the aunts would be helping nieces and nephews and neighbors. And there was a more community, I think, surrounding the care of children. And I don't, I don't know how far back that would go, but like, mothers were home in the neighborhoods and talk each other.
- [86:26]
Beth
Well, you hide your clothes in the backyard and you talk to the neighbor who was also hanging their clothes out to dry. Right.
- [86:30]
Jenny Urich
My kids got this rare. Or my kids, you know, what are you using for mosquito bites? So this gets that conversation going offline. Offline. Yeah.
- [86:39]
Beth
I really love this idea of yours. I, I, I hope this helps. I really hope this, this tool is used by people and, and they really enjoy it. Like, I, I'm really proud of it and I'm really excited that everybody can have it. There's no barriers to having it or whatever.
- [86:52]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [86:53]
Beth
I'll say something I don't. You have such a big crowd. This might be like a dangerous thing to offer, but I've had several people reach out and we've done something special. You mentioned mops, you know, mothers of preschoolers and stuff. A couple people had church groups where they wanted to be doing stuff. They want to have like a monthly thing. And I made a deal and had a special coupon for them for their a little bit better if they had like 10 people all together and so that they would watch one module. Like, each time they were together, they'd print out the manual ahead of time so they could build that mutual vocabulary together and team up. And then I gave them a special deal of that. We were doing a virtual Q and A for an hour as a group when they get done with this thing.
- [87:33]
Unnamed Speaker
Okay.
- [87:33]
Beth
And it's so fun. We're about to do our first live Q A and I'm, I'm really excited about it.
- [87:39]
Jenny Urich
So they take a step further and take the get well soon course together as a group.
- [87:44]
Beth
They each buy one, but get a better yes.
- [87:46]
Jenny Urich
And they each buy one and they're doing it at the same time. And then they can talk about all these things. And they all have the same toolbox. I remember when I did mops and it and now it's called Momco. And it was very transformative to me. And I know you've gone and spot spoken at different mops. I've gone and spoken a couple times too, but, but we did a course called Laugh your way to a better marriage. And they, it was a sort of a similar thing where there was different videos and they showed them throughout the year. So this is the same Thing and, and this is really pertinent, like obviously similar to a marriage type thing, it was helpful. But the overall health of your home and as children grow and that type of thing, it's a brilliant idea. And often in those mom type groups that are run through churches and things like that, a lot of times they bring in mentor moms. And so, you know, maybe there might be some grandmas in there, there might be some moms with older kids who can start to sort of walk through or maybe they're missing the information too and they get it.
- [88:40]
Beth
Brought your mother in law where you're both where they want you to do some. Like, I have a lot of moms who call me and they're at odds with one of their relatives who adore them, their mom or their mother in law. And they want them to do antibiotics for everything. And mom's like, well, I read that doing it for everything might kind of actually affect the immune system of my kid. I'd rather just save it for when it's really necessary. And they're like, yeah, but we just did it all the time. Like, yeah, but like, why not bring along those people and do it together? Why like watch the webinar over a holiday weekend together with the relatives? Like, so you're kind of like, like, because the authority from afar. Because then they can be mad at me if they don't like it instead of at you.
- [89:18]
Jenny Urich
Right, sure.
- [89:19]
Beth
It's authority of a far. Of a far part. And the webinar just gives people a taste. It gives them some. Give some things you can use tonight for real. It gives you a thing that you can with the fevers you. Gives you all the questions that you can do. And it gives you a really example of some of the ways that I like to share information. And then if you're interested in the get well soon, we've talked about it before, but I offer a money back guarantee for 90 days. I completely believe in it. And it's been the answer. It's actually freed up more time for me to make more helpfulness to everybody in content and classes because I'm able to just literally refer everybody to it. It's like they would have the cough. I'm like, you need to see the cough. Read the cough chapter.
- [89:56]
Jenny Urich
I mean, I did that. I had this cough and I think a lot of people have. It lasted like six weeks. I mean it lasted forever. And that's what you said.
- [90:03]
Beth
Go.
- [90:04]
Jenny Urich
I mean, I probably think I must have called you because you were like, open up the cough. Chapter in your body. You know, I have mine. I printed mine out and it's in a binder. It's wonderful. And I just referred to that and it helped quite a bit. And it was all these different types of coughs and you're looking for which one. I was like, I have all of the above typ at some point. But, you know, and it was really helpful. So I just want to really clarify so everybody understands what you have to offer. There is a free webinar. This is a brand new thing for you. You have stretched. And when you stretch. I just want to throw this out there. I love this. What is your common sense and intuition telling you when you stretch? It helps you build common sense and intuition. And that's sort of what we're trying to get at here, is that we're sitting here talking about sick kids, but we've talked about so much else because the stretching in your life and the stretching in my life, those have given both of us a lot of thoughts, a lot of thoughts about all sorts of different topics. And when I call you and we talk or we get together at the diner or whatever, we talk about a lot of different things. And the wisdom has seeped into a lot of different areas of life. I can call you about all sorts of different things and discernments and things. So the value, I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the value of having a little bit more control in your healthcare, let's say it's not just about that. It's not just about that. I have, you know, for me personally, I've just grown so much since taking care of my healthcare more, but in so many other ways that I never could have imagined. So I guess I'm just trying to encourage. This isn't just about this one thing. No, it's really about a lot of things.
- [91:41]
Beth
Yes.
- [91:41]
Jenny Urich
And it just. It builds you up. It builds you up.
- [91:43]
Beth
Yeah. It applies to having babies. It applies to parenting children, whether you've had them out of your body or not. It applies to getting outside. And it's all about that by stretching into these areas. That. And learning to lean into the stretch and to honor it and not discount it or. Or be rough on ourselves because it feels like we're stumbling a little bit. And then it's. That is really what lets us to increase our confidence and increase our capacity for problem solving.
- [92:12]
Jenny Urich
Yeah.
- [92:12]
Beth
And that's where I see the leveling up happening, is that people are more confident in looking for solutions and in finding the ones that work for them because it's going to be different for everybody. People don't have to only be in natural health or anything like that. There's a lot of ways to do what's right for your family.
- [92:28]
Jenny Urich
Right. And to cast a vision. When you have young kids at home, it's hard to see down the road, but you're casting a vision for when you have a teen or when you have an early 20s and what their approach to their health is and that you have inadvertently given them a toolbox. Now, they may not use all of your tools and they may make fun of your tools for a bit of time, but a lot of times they come back around and they say, well, they know that you are the one that's got a lot of answers and they ask the different questions. So it's really a valuable use of your time. And that's really the only investment for this piece because it's a free webinar. It is called how to evaluate your sick how to evaluate your sick kids. It comes with a free download. Let me feel your forehead. A mom's guide to evaluating sick kids. Where can you find it?
- [93:17]
Beth
It's going to have a link for you so you can put it with your. With your notes. You can also go to indigoforest.com my website, and you'll see there's. Oh, actually you. We made a thing. So it's indigoforest.com forward/000 hours and it will take you right to it.
- [93:34]
Jenny Urich
Okay, that's perfect. And then also you have herbal baths and other things that people can use. You've got a newsletter stuff on the website.
- [93:40]
Beth
They can see all the cool stuff.
- [93:42]
Jenny Urich
Yes. I mean, all the information is there and we are wrapping it up here. We're wrapping it up here. More to come. Lots more.
- [93:47]
Beth
Thanks for having me. I enjoyed being here, Jenny.
- [93:49]
Jenny Urich
It was a stretch and we made it work. It's going to be a stretch for me to figure out how to edit it it and I'm going to stretch that way, too. But really fun to have this on the go podcast thing and we may do it at the diner. We talked about this. We can set up little microphones like weirdos. We've got lots of ideas. Thank you so much for being here, Beth, and thank you to everyone who.
- [94:08]
Beth
Listened in and thanks for hanging in there through this wonderful conversation.