Month: December 2016

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Certified Organic Baby Skincare

We have been nominated as a finalist in the Australian Certified Organic Awards and we have just launched a fully certified organic baby range. Its amazing! There are lots of brands that are registered as organic, or use organic ingredients, but I don’t know of a brand that has achieved this 100%.

Sixteen years ago I started a beautiful retail business in Byron Bay, Australia’s first organic baby store. Seven years ago, we started making our own branded product which we have been successfully selling but I held out on one more goal….to create a beautiful, affordable, baby skincare range that is ACO Certified Organic 100%!! It was not viable to put out a range without a baby wash, this was the sticking point all these years.

I was so strict about ingredients that I said I would never launch a baby range until it was over 95% and preferably 100%. We have one at 95% and the rest at 99 – 100% !!! My vision was clear, it had to be possible one day and I waited 7rs to ensure it happened.

I just could not stand behind my brand name without it being pure and verified as such by ACO. I have watched competitors grow with skincare that was up to 70% organic which sometimes felt defeated but I had a standard that I would not lower. Turns out, it was worth the wait!

In recent years, the importance of a Gluten Free Diet has become high on the health agenda so I added this to my list of goals, gluten free and certified organic for skincare. Our Skin is the largest organic in our body so it can absorb gluten through the skin if applied. Added to this, I insisted on no plastic so we have strong amber glass bottles to hold our lovely range.

The biggest sticking point in developing a baby range is the BABY WASH! Companies have tried over the years to develop a 100% organic baby wash but the major barriers have been – too many ingredients, too expensive, not enough foaming, not gentle enough, wrong PH. So additives prevented certification. Most “organic” baby washes in the market have between 20 – 70% organic ingredients, a significant portion is still using known harmful additives in the belief that this is the best that could be done.

In January 2016, I made a phone call to someone who I had met the Organic Industry Dinner 5 yrs earlier. At that time, I told him my goal and expressed that I felt his company had the ingredients that could help me. He said to me it would be possible. That person was Andreas from NUI. He had been working on a saponification formula with 4 simple ingredients to create a lush and moisturizing soap formula. They had achieved the outcome I was looking for and had been sitting on it with hardly anyone knowing about it. He remembered me immediately and a wonderful, short and successful phone call meant I could now reach my goal of a pure baby wash, 100% certified organic. He wanted to sell the raws and they would happily sell it to me! ( happy dance )

Andreas had little desire to market skincare, he just wanted to create the good stuff and work with farmers! He was sitting on this amazing product that had taken years of perfection of their secret recipe. He had even certified the product but it was not out there in the market. He was relieved that someone like us would create products with it!

While NUI has organic food and skincare products in the market, their true passion and achievement has been working on establishing sustainable farming and certifying farmers as organic in the south pacific. A whole other amazing story. So the fair trade component of this story was the perfect outcome for us.

So for the past 9 months ( just like a gestating woman! ) , we have been through the process of funding, partnerships, design, marketing, certification and finally manufacturing. What a wonderful natural cycle for our baby skincare to be born.

In May 2016 we took the sample range to the Naturally Good Expo to get retailer input. We found ourselves flooded with excitement and have been dealing with their excited enquiries every month since waiting for our birth! We picked up the range last week in its complete form, just in time to snap a photos and enter these awards…phew!

We have a huge demand and even new distributers on board already, major international interest and we are just overwhelmed in the best way possible about our achievement.

Three of our existing products have been best selling to rave reviews in major baby and health food stores over the last 7 yrs. They are:

Certified Organic Bottom Balm in two sizes. 45g and 85g

Certified Organic Wonder Balm 45g

Certified Organic Nipple Balm 10g

Here are the final 3 items including the unique offering of an ACO certified baby wash. Please excuse the photo, we are getting professional shots next Tuesday.

Baby Wash

Baby Powder

Baby Massage Oil

My biggest learning from this experience is to hold on to big, ambitious visions. Do not compromise, even when a goal does not appear to be achievable and the obstacles are high. Even when I it feels like a failure, keep believing success is possible because purity is worth it. Keep talking to people about it, network in the industry, remind others of my goals and network every chance you get. Take the risks to contact people who might be able to help.

Ultimately, I believe that nature does provide us with what we need and when we work with nature, not against it, we both have a greater chance of survival.

As a result of this project and vision I have had for so long, I attracted interest from a existing certified organic cosmetic business who wanted to make my products so we now employ them as producers for our Made in Australia Baby Skincare Products. Now the financial and well as the ethical rewards will be high.

Nature’s Child Skincare is Manufactured on the Gold Coast in Australia in a certified organic facility. We have our own ACO certification for our brand as well.

Nature’s Child has been a strong brand in the organic baby market for 15 years in Australia but we have never been as excited about a product launch like this one. Thank you for the opportunity to consider us in your prestigious awards. You can read what others have to say about the product launch here with this lovely article by Baylee Wood.

Best Certified Organic Product of the Year (Cosmetic) finalist at ACO Awards 2016

Nature’s Child Organic Baby Range – Launch Oct 1 , 2016

100% Gluten Free, 100% ACO Certified Organic 12013

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Our Skincare Launch by Nature’s Child

Sixteen years ago, Jannine had a vision. She absolutely knew that she could create an entire line of baby products that avoided the chemical-dependent norm. Every step was a challenge, but also opened new possibilities, greater potential and a deeper understanding of the products she was working with.

This is a culmination of sorts of a 16-year journey for Nature’s Child’s Jannine Barron, a persistent devotion to the notion that childcare and baby products not only can, but also should be one hundred per cent organic.

“What if nature has all we actually need, and all we have to do is just open our eyes and realise that these products are growing in our back yards, we just haven’t discovered them yet,” she suggests of the fundamental concept behind Nature’s Child. “What if it’s all there and we’re just blinded by this idea that we have to use chemical to make it cheaper or make it work?

“Being a responsible and ethical business was the basis of everything. It is essential to how I operate on a daily basis, it’s part of our nature, so it’s vitally important, and it’s also another reason to strive to be successful, because we want to show other businesses that you can be successful as an ethical company.”

As an all-natural businessperson in an artificial world of cheap, toxic cosmetics and products, one could imagine that Jannine would be scathing and judgemental of the current marketplace. While she may dislike and disagree with the use of chemicals, she is however incredibly open-minded and understanding, not necessarily validating or condoning the commercial cosmetics industry and its brands, yet neither does she speak ill of her competition.

“There’s a lot of compromising in the market that’s very price-based, but I wanted to come up with the purest product I possibly could.”

The intricacies of creating a natural, organic product that is effective, certified, yet still competitively priced has been a constant challenge for the Nature’s Child team. With the constant temptation of quicker and easier options, her scruples could have easily been compromised, creating ‘mostly’ organic products cheaper and ahead of time. But to her resounding credit, Jannine always remained true to her morals:

“I could have put a skincare range out five years ago, but the technology or the ingredients weren’t available for me to feel like I could put my brand name behind it,” she says of her product development. “I have taken on the personal challenge of finding a way to use nothing nasty. It took me a lot longer to get there, but because I had this vision, I just seemed to connect with the right people.”

Gaining organic certification, too, was no easy hurdle, the intricacies of the process and countless boxes to be ticked creating a huge amount of extra work and ensuing problems for the company.

“It’s such a complex process to achieve the organic certification,” she illuminates. “I don’t think people realise, when they’re just looking at products on the shelf that, if that logo is there saying that you’re one hundred per cent certified organic, it is such a big deal. There’s a lot of complexity and reporting and auditing that goes in to independently verifying the product for consumers as completely chemical-free.”

Another issue she has brought into question is the use of so-called ‘safe’ chemicals. Every product that reaches retail is meticulously scrutinised, every ingredient requiring approval on what is known in the industry as a material data safety sheet. While individually these ingredients may be deemed safe, Jannine wonders whether the combination might become a volatile cocktail:

Jannine has peered deep into the grey areas of marketing and business, determined to learn their truths so that she can avoid their pitfalls. This analysis is not confined to ingredients, but expanded to every aspect of her business, and many valuable lessons have been discovered to which all contemporary businesses could do well to listen and adhere to.

Sustainability, for example, Jannine sees as nothing more than the foundation, a starting point from which to improve business. At the rate we are consuming resources, we will need over four Planet Earths to survive – this is ‘sustainability’. To sustain is to remain the same, but what we must do, says Jannine, is go beyond sustainability to regeneration.

“When you have an organically certified process, you are making sure that, not only is the earth not being harmed, but it is actually being regenerated by what you do. That’s where we have to be – sustainability is just the starting point.”

Jannine’s aim with Nature’s Child has always been to bring natural, organic and cost-effective products to as many people as possible, sharing their benefits and educating by example. Through her retail store in Byron’s industrial estate, she had connected with many local and visiting new parents, many of whom she has remained in contact with as their children have grown into young adults. Though a tough decision to step away from this very personal and hands-on approach, she has concluded that the only way to achieve her dreams is to take Nature’s Child into the world of wholesale, expanding her reach far beyond the Shire, not just across Australia, but also globally.

Thank you to Common Ground for their longer article LOVE YOUR LITTLE ONES NATURALLY ARTICLE AT COMMON GROUND

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NAPPY FREE ALSO KNOWN AS ELIMINATION COMMUNICATION BY DR SARAH BUCKLEY GP

Mothering, Mindfulness and a Baby’s Bottom

 

An introduction to Elimination Communication

Published in The Mother magazine, UK issue number 3, autumn 2002 (www.themothermagazine.co.uk)

Elimination Communication (EC)- also known as Infant Potty Training (IPT), Elimination Timing (ET), Going Diaperless and Natural Infant Hygeine- is how most babies are brought up around the world. This ‘method’, which is so integral and so obvious in most cultures that it needs no name, involves the mother and baby becoming attuned and communicative so that the mother knows when the baby needs to eliminate- wee or poo.

I first heard the phrase Elimination Communication when my fourth baby Maia Rose was 3 months old, and a friend pointed me towards the EC website- see below. I was very excited about it, and the timing was perfect, as I had read in a letter to Mothering magazine a few years earlier, that African women cue their babies to wee and poo with a ‘psss’ sound, and I had begun to do this with Maia from birth. This practice made sense to me because it felt closer to our genetic imprint, and I was drawn to the idea of a deeper physical and psychic connection with my baby. The first time I tried it, I held Maia (aged 3 months) over the laundry tub, and made the pss noise. To my delight, she weed straight away, and we have been doing it ever since.

It has been more fun and more rewarding for our family than I could have imagined. It has given us more skin-to-skin contact, less washing, no nappy rash, and, best of all for me, a deeper respect for Maia’s abilities and knowledge of her body, and a finer attunement to her rhythms. As well as these advantages, there is obviously less waste and a better time for Mother Earth. And it’s fun! Having had three babies in nappies, I have been constantly delighted at Maia’s ability to communicate her needs–and to keep telling me until I get it.

Elimination Communication (EC) as I call it, also makes a beautiful contribution to my experience of mindfulness in my mothering. Like breastfeeding, it keeps me close to my baby, physically and psychologically, and provides very immediate feedback when I am not tuned in.

As a GP (family MD) the physiology is interesting to me, and is totally counter to what I was taught at medical school, where it is asserted that babies do not have sphincter control until close to the second birthday. Obviously the paediatricians didn’t consult the global majority of mothers and babies, for whom knowing their baby’s elimination needs is as simple as knowing their own.

From the start, I’ve had a lot of support from Emma (11), Zoe (8) and Jacob (6), who tell me how much they disliked sitting in wet or soiled nappies as babies. Some believe that we set up our society for sexual problems by encouraging our babies to dissociate, or switch off from their genital areas because of the unpleasant sensation of wearing what some have called a “walking toilet.” My partner Nicholas wondered about the extra effort that I went to in the first year, but has been very happy to reap the benefits of a nappy-free toddler.

Reflecting on my experiences with babies in and out of nappies, I’ve come to the conclusion that probably ALL babies signal their elimination needs from an early age, but because we’re not listening out for it, we misinterpret it as tiredness, needing to feed, or just crankiness, especially if our baby is in a nappy and we don’t observe the connection with eliminating. In the first few months, I learnt Maia’s signals by carrying her around without nappies or pants and observing her closely. (This was fairly easy, as she was very much ‘in arms’ for her first six months.) I discovered that she would squirm and become unsettled, sometimes with a bit of crying, especially if it took me a while to “get it.”

At other times, it was more psychic, and I found myself heading for the laundry tub, where we usually eliminated, without really thinking. When I was distracted, or delayed acting on my hunch, I usually got peed on. (However, she very seldom peed on me when I carried her in a sling) Her signal for poo was usually few farts, or sometimes she’d even pull off the breast as a means of signalling that she needed to go. She didn’t want to sit in her own poo!

Learning Maia’s daily pattern was also useful. She usually pooed first thing in the morning, and, as a baby, tended to pee frequently (about every 10 minutes) in the first few hours after arising. (My husband found this really tricky when he was ‘on duty’ in the morning.) I noticed that she would also pee about 10 minutes after breastfeeding or drinking. She still almost always pees on awaking; I think it is the need to eliminate that actually wakens her.

In her first year, we used the laundry tub by preference. I’d hold her upright by her thighs, with her back resting on my belly. A small sandpit-type bucket with a conveniently concave lip was useful from the early days; I’d hold it between my thighs, sitting, and hold Maia above it. The blue bucket- now a family icon- has been very well travelled, and also came into its own at night later on- see below. As she got older and heavier, I found that sitting her on the toilet in front of me worked well- sometimes we’d have a ‘double wee’, which was always successful if nothing else worked! Along with the position, I cued her with my “psss” noise, and sometimes at the tub, when I thought she had a need but was slow to start, I’d turn on the tap as well.

After 3 months or so of doing this, I became more sure of my interpretation and I would sometimes gently persist, even where she was initially reluctant, and usually she’d go in half a minute or so. However, for me, it’s a fine line, and I think it’s vital to have cooperation, and not a battle of wills, which can sometimes develop around “toileting.” It’s more a dance of togetherness that develops, as with breastfeeding, from love and respect for each other.

On a practical level, I used nappies (I love those Weenies pilchers!) when we were out and about, and weed her as much as I could, but I didn’t expect to be perfect in these, or any, circumstances. We used toilets or took the bucket (or another plastic container with a tight lid) in the car. When we missed a pee, my reaction was just, “Oh well, missed that one.” On hot days, I just lay a nappy on the car seat. If it wasn’t convenient to stop, I’d say to her, “Oh, Maia, you’ll have to pee in the nappy, and I’ll change it as soon as we stop.” Maia didn’t like to be disturbed at night in the early months, so I’d lie her on a bunny rug and just let her wee. I changed this whenever I woke up. Or I’d wrap a cloth nappy loosely around her bum and change it when wet. I found that, as with naps, she usually weed on awaking and then nursed.

Around 6 to 7 months, Maia went ‘on strike’, coinciding with teething and beginning to crawl. She stopped signalling clearly and at times actively resisted being “weed.” I took it gently, offering opportunities to eliminate when it felt right and not getting upset when, after refusing to go in the laundry tub, she went on the floor. Even on “bad days,” though, we still had most poos in a bowl, bucket or the toilet.

At nearly 10 months, we were back on track. I noticed that as she became more independent and engrossed in her activity, she was not keen to be removed to eliminate, so I started to bring a receptacle to her. She preferred a bowl or bucket on my lap, and later we began to use a potty: I initially held her while she used it. At night time, I started sitting her on the blue bucket (and on the breast at the same time, tricky to lie down afterwards and not spill the bucket!). When I was less alert, she weed on a nappy between her legs and/or the bunny rug underneath her.

There was a marked shift in things soon after she began walking at 12 months, and by 14 months, to my amazement, Maia was out of nappies completely. She now was able to communicate her needs very clearly, both verbally and non-verbally, and her ability to “hold on” was also enhanced. When she needed to eliminate, she said “wee” and/or headed for the potty–we had several around the house. Nicholas, her dad, was so delighted when she first did this that he clapped her, and so she would stand up and applaud herself afterwards. She began to be very interested in the fate of her body products, and joined me as we tipped it onto the garden or into the toilet. (Now she wants to empty the potty herself) She even began to get a cloth and wipe up after herself!

With this change, I stopped using nappies altogether, and switched to trainer pants–the Bright Bots (Target, Australia) are great, and come in small sizes-for going out. Dresses are great too, for outings with bare-bottomed girls in our warm summer months. Now, at 19 months, Maia is totally autonomous in her day-time elimination. She tells us her needs (with lots of warning) and/or goes to the potty herself. Although I take a change of pants when we go out, it is very rare to need them- compared to my other children she is about the 2 ½ to 3 year old stage with her toiletting.

Nightimes continue to be busy for us, with lots of feeding and weeing, but, unless she is unwell, or I am very tired, we have very few “misses”, and sitting up at night to wee her seems to me a small effort in return for the benefits we currently reap. It seems, from other stories, that many EC babies stop weeing at night even in the first year, or have a predictable pattern (eg not weeing after midnight), and no doubt Maia will do this in the next year or so.

As a mindful mother, it interests me is that EC babies learn to release before they learn to hold on. This makes it EC very convenient because, when cooperative, a baby can empty even a small amount of wee from the bladder. (This means, for example, that when I wee Maia in the garden before starting a car trip, I know that there will then be minimal chance of Maia needing to wee for at least half an hour or so.) In contrast, conventional toilet training is built around the child’s ability to ‘hold on’ to their wee and poo, until they can release it in a socially acceptable place. I wonder, then, about the mind-body implications of this subtle but important difference. Aren’t we a society where we tend to “hold on” to our “stuff,” often needing the help of others (eg therapists) to encourage us to “let it out.”

One of my friends, a bodyworker, commented on Maia’s relaxed mouth, and this made me wonder if the process might relax the whole digestive tract. I can also feel in my mothering the beauty of supporting her healthy eliminative functions, which many of us feel shameful about and would prefer to deny–hence nappies, which hide the eliminating act itself.

Furthermore, the ‘toilet training stage’ is, in Erikson’s psychological stages, centred on the issue of ‘autonomy vs shame and doubt’, and it seems to me that Maia has mastered these issues already- she is incredibly autonomous- not to say bossy at times!!- and I wonder if this might be in part due to being an early mistress of her elimination.(She’s also a Leo, Aries rising!)

For me, the beauty of elimination communication has been in the process, not in the outcome, however remarkable or convenient. Yes, it’s great to do less than a full load of washing each day for a family of six, but much more significant is the learning that mothers and babies are connected very deeply–at a “gut level”–and that babies (and mothers) are much more capable and smart than our society credits. I feel very blessed to have had this experience.

I have experienced EC with only one baby, starting at a young age. Many women in many places have done it differently- started from birth or with an older baby, made less or more use of nappies, taken a long time or a short time to catch on, done EC part-time or full time and some women have even begun work outside the home and trained their baby’s carers in EC.

If you feel drawn to EC,I encourage you to have a go. Look on the internet- it’s all I needed to get started, as well as invaluable on-going support. There are also two great books- see below-and you can ask other Mums (including myself) and mothers from cultures such as India and China where this practice is still widespread. Although it can be more complex for older babies, some of whom may have already learned to ignore their body’s signals, others may welcome the chance to communicate their elimination needs.

I wish you ease, pleasure and mindfulness in your mothering.

RESOURCES to look up

Jana Kutarna’s “Did You Say Without Diapers?”

Scott Noelle’s article (Continuum Concept- EC with a toddler)

Johnson Family Infant Potty Training Page

Trickle Treat—Laurie Boucke (includes info about her new book)

Books & DVD

Diaper Free!: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene, by Ingrid Bauer 2001

Infant Potty Training- A Gentle and Primeval Method Adapted to Modern Living. Laurie Boucke, 2000 White-Boucke Publishing

DVD by Nicole Moore NAPPY FREE