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Your Baby Wrap Christmas Gifts

I can’t tell you how excited I am to roll out a few new, beautiful gifts I’ve been working on for YOU!  Talking with the Wrap Your Baby community on Facebook helped me pinpoint what sort of things would be appreciated and I was fortunate enough to get tons of feedback from the wonderful ladies (and occasional gentlemen) there so I am confident these will be just what is needed and wanted . . .

A magnetic picture frame for your moment of baby wrap triumph!

My gifts to you:

• A cool magnet: pop out the inner magnet and the outer portion becomes a magnetic picture frame on your fridge.  Print a photo of you (or your husband, or your mom) wrapping your baby and voila–instant WrapStar!
• Some babywearing info cards to help you out when you get the inevitable questions about what your wrap is, where you got it, and how you use it.  Also nice for informing people who are worried about the safety of your wrap.  If you are part of a babywearing group or any other group that is a good resource for babywearing, write the contact info or meeting place and time on the back of the card.  If not, and you are willing to help out newbies yourself, put your own phone number or email address so that people you hand the card to can find local babywearing help!
• Your own babywearing bumper sticker!  Tell the world that you are keeping your baby close to your heart!
• A pair of beautiful koala earrings…and, of course, the koala is babywearing!
• An instructional wrapping DVD.

All the gifts will be included with any wrap or baby wearing coat/outerwear order between now and Christmas.

If you want to have a magnet, bumper sticker, or info cards for yourself or a loved one (stocking stuffer?) without placing an order this month, send me an email requesting them and I’ll try to get it out.  I say “try” because I can’t predict the volume of response, and I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep (busy mom with three little kids over here, you know)!

Babywearing Bumper Sticker

Inside panels of folded Babywearing Info Card

Unique Babywearing Koala Earrings

Babywearing Halloween Costumes

Great submissions from babywearing families on our facebook page.  Check them out here!

And the winners of one fleece babycarrier cover are the monkey and the mama tree:

Babywearing Halloween (win a prize)!

I love the idea of a tandem costume.  You know, you and your wrapped up baby (or toddler) are something together.  A Kangaroo and a joey (as sported by Alyson Hannigan in the above photo).  An owl in a tree.  A two-headed monster.

Whether you’ve got older kids to take trick-or-treating, or you’re dressing up for a party, I want to see those tandem costumes!  Post your photo on the Wrap Your Baby Facebook page next week to join in.  We’ll count up which photo gets the most “likes” and I’ll send a warm fleece babywearing cover* to the lucky tandem pair!

But just for participating, winner or not, you will get 10% off a purchase from my store!  Just send me an email with a link to your photo on Facebook, and I’ll send you the coupon code!

So, everyone who posts a picture gets 10% off, and one winning photo will get a free babywearing cover for winter!  It’s a win-win-win situation!  I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

*if the winner is outside the US, I will have to ask you to pay shipping–sorry!

Some costume brainstorming ideas from the community at large:

• http://www.facebook.com/wrapyourbaby/posts/286180864730329
• http://www.facebook.com/wrapyourbaby/posts/308714449143637

The Wrap Photos

I wish I could send a prize to everyone! I am not kidding when I say this was hard.  In the end I practically just tossed a coin because I couldn’t stop going round and round on these great photos.  I had photos of children learning about the world from a wrap, babies were snuggling in  perfect contentment on a parent’s chest, mommies babywearing and daddies babywearing, infants and toddlers, broad smiles, wide eyes, and sleepy grins, wrapping in the water and in the snow, in the orchard and in the city…

It’s just what I wanted: the variety of where wrapping takes you, but I didn’t realize how impossible the choosing would be.  There were also some really stunningly beautiful photos that would win a photography contest, but I was looking for context, too: all the places that wrapping can take you, how much of life you can experience with your baby!

Do you feel sorry for me, yet?  No, you just want me to shut up and show you some pictures, already!  Okay, okay, here’s what you want:

The two mommas who have a free babywearing pendant coming their way are:

Candace, who so epitomized “mommy” that the very description of her photo won the hearts of so many of you–like April who commented, “A picture of how babywearing brings joy and simplicity to what could be drudgery. We all have babies, we all clean up messes on hands and knees, with mussed hair. No matter the ethnicity, the creed, the country. We are ALL mothers!”

And Amanda, who gave me scores of photos of her family wrapping with multiple parents and through multiple children (sometimes both kids at once) across years in the snow, in orchards, on hay rides and firetrucks…so here’s just a sample:

I’m going to make these photos into a movie about baby wrapping, but in the meantime, here’s are a  few of the others I had to choose between:

Beautiful Wrap Photos

I asked for photos of “where wrapping has taken you” and was flooded with beautiful pictures of happy wrapped babies 🙂

One winner was already chosen, but I promised three, and I’m having a hell of a time choosing those last two winners.  Narrowing it down has caused me an entire Saturday of agonizing, and now I seem able to narrow no narrower:

1. Do I pick the breathtaking moment of sibling bonding in the woods?
2. Or the mom with baby on back peeking through leaves in an orchard?
3. I’m sorely tempted to choose the photo of a mom on hands and knees, cleaning up a mess, grinning up through mussed hair with a happily undressed baby on her back–you know, the one I can relate to most of the time!
4. But then there’s the way wrapping brought a little Native American baby to her first powwow…

So help me out, here.  Based solely on my descriptions, which photo do you choose?

Travelling and Wrapping

For the past two and a half months we’ve been traveling (those of you ordering wraps may see varying postmarks!) and the wrap has taken us everywhere from way out in nature, to the Staten Island Ferry.  We haven’t missed a step.

I can’t say it’s more helpful than when we’re at home though, because I use it just as much when I’m being a domestic stay at home mother and housewife type.

And conducting business on the road?  A little tricky because the internet connection and electricity are not reliable–we’re not in hotel rooms, but in our motorhome.  And it’s a very little motorhome so we have to take out the kids’ carseats when we get an order to take a wrap out from the underseat storage.  This hasn’t been too bad, since we just pretty much do this once a day before we drive, and the carseats are taken out every night to change the seats into the girls’ bed anyway.  We sure could have used some of that storage space for clothes, though.  Or craft supplies!

But we’ve kept up relatively well with customer communications and we’ve maintained a speedy shipping rate, and I think the experiment could be summarized as a success!

We’re back in Florida now, where all the grandparents are, and where our house is still under negotiations.  Still under negotiations means it still belongs to us, so that gives us somewhere to park and plug in while we’re here.  And we’re staying a while because we want to have Thanksgiving with our whole family, since we won’t be here for Christmas.  And we’ve got plenty to do before we leave around the first of December.  I would love to get some work done on the Wrap Your Baby business, including but not limitted to:

• picking photo contest winners (from the contest I held a few months back)
• compiling a photo montage from the contest entries and sharing it with the world
• making a super quick “nursing from FWCC” video
• making a tandem babywearing video
• putting together a pregnancy wrapping video
• updating my mailing list
• adding gift certifcates to my website
• adding a couple of products for sale on my website
• adding some sponsorship to my blog

We have a lot of goals that are not Wrap Your Baby related, too, so we’ll see how much gets done!  But as always, I’m available by email, on Facebook, and we are shipping out orders every day.  And at least I’m not bored!

Gorgeous Wrap Sale!

This is a my-loss-is-your-gain sale. Here’s what happened: A tiny, unnoticed leak in our motorhome got to where my Bali Breeze Kimber wraps were stored. All of my Bali Breeze wraps are in one place except for the Kimber which just didn’t fit. So I’m fortunate that only the Kimbers were affected!

So I’ve washed and dried them and now my entire stock of Kimbers is in like-new, unworn, washed-once condition. Since buyers are supposed to wash these wraps before wearing them, I should really charge extra for the service, but instead I’ve decided to offer these wraps at a discount:

Buy a Kimber baby wrap by end of day Monday to save $12 using coupon code RainyDaySale

Like you needed an excuse to buy a stunning, shimmery, batiked, gauze wrap with earthy leaves and a subdued rainbow of colors…!