Product Review: Robeez Soft Sole Boots

Mar25

My almost 18 month old has a favorite pair of shoes and will rarely wear anything but them: a hand-me-down pair of Robeez soft leather shoes with cute little puppies on them. My daughter wore her favorite Robeez with dragons on them and my older son had a favorite pair with trains. These shoes are inextricably linked with toddlerhood to me–the small hand reaching up to join mine and then setting forth on uneven terrain with an extra bounce of confidence in the step, once securely hand in hand. So, when I had a chance to review some fabulous new Robeez soft leather boots, I jumped at the chance! Available in multiple sizes and colors, these little boots are quite simply: beautiful.

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Soft and flexible, they mold to my toddler’s feet, protecting them from his adventurous terrain and yet allowing them full range of motion so important for healthy foot development. For our family, Robeez shoes have been all-terrain, all-weather, sometimes-even-napped-in, childhood favorites. All of our kids have liked to go barefoot whenever possible and we find that Robeez are the next closest thing.

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The fur-lined interior of the boots gives them both extra comfort as well as extra protection against wear, meaning they will last for a long time. Plus, did I mention cute?!

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These boots have a non-slip suede outsole which helps prevent slipping. They also have an elasticized ankle band which does a great job keeps the boots on securely.

The boots in my photos above are the Brown Classic Baby Boots. Giveaway now closed. I’m excited to have another pair of Robeez boots to give away as well! The giveaway pair are the Cozy Ankle style instead, which have a suede upper and faux-fur lining.

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Size 12-18 months, there are several ways to enter to win this pair of Brown Cozy Ankle Boots for your own precious little one.

Leave a comment letting me know why you’d like to win these boots!
Follow Talk Birth on Facebook and leave a comment on the picture I post there.
For a bonus entry, share this post on social media (and leave a comment letting me know you did so).

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Giveaway is open until March 28th. Good luck! These are certifiably adorable!

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Disclosure: I received a complimentary pair of these boots for review purposes. All photos in this review were taken by me of the boots I received.

Free Mini Course: Womanspirit Wisdom

Jan14

I’ve developed three new free mini courses to offer this year. The first is ready to roll and begins on February 1!

Here are the details…

Womanspirit Wisdom

This three-week ecourse is designed to offer you a gently nourishing daily “sacred pause.” Beginning February 1, each day for 21 days, take a moment and simply receive. There is nothing to do, just enjoy taking a daily minute to connect with yourself.

Includes:

Daily inspirational quotes and food for thought
Song and poem recordings
Optional journal and photo prompts
$25 discount on Red Tent Initiation course or on the Womanspirit Initiation course, both beginning March 21
Creative Spirit Circle membership + weekly Brigid’s Grove email newsletter subscription

Join the Womanspirit Mini Class!

Peace on Earth Begins with Birth! Goddess Mandala Greeting Card Bundle

Dec14

Happy Holidays from Brigid’s Grove! We’ve created a fun, free bundle of Goddess Greeting Cards for you to use this year. Your download includes:

Black and white and color versions of two different card designs
A black and white Celtic Roots card specifically for winter (this is my favorite!)
Three coloring pages to offer you a sacred pause in the midst of holiday hubbub.
You can also download a goddess mandala desktop background

The cards are laid out to print two to a sheet. Simply cut the pages in half and then fold and, voilà, you have nifty greeting cards ready to send or give to friends. You may color the designs or leave them in simple black and white. Or, print out the already colored versions.

DOWNLOAD YOUR BUNDLE

Other ideas:

Cut out the circles on the cards, color them, and make them into bookmarks for your women’s circle or to have an easily mailable, simple, cost-effective tiny present for the holidays. After coloring, mount the circle onto a bookmark length piece of cardstock and laminate (or, simply cover on both sides with clear contact paper). You can also embellish with stickers, affirming messages, and additional drawing, doodling, or collage. Gel pens are amazing for coloring these, but regular markers or colored pencils also work. I incorporated Womanrunes into some of my bookmarks.
Have coloring pages or cards available at your holiday event and encourage people to take some time to relax and enjoy coloring together.
Print a batch of cards out in black and white and have them available for quick notes of affirmation, greeting, or inspiration, and tuck them in with other mail that goes out for the holidays.
A doula friend is printing the “Peace on Earth” birth goddess mandala cards to send out to local hospital staff as her holiday greeting this year. If you’re a doula or childbirth educator, you may wish to do this too!
Let your kids color pages or cards to give to others as simple gifts (my daughter has been making bookmarks with me).
Feel free to share your finished designs with us on Instagram using #brigidsgrove or #creativespiritcircle

Membership in our Creative Spirit Circle is FREE and packed with beautiful, bountiful resources, including a free Womanrunes e-course, a private Facebook group, Red Tent materials, birth blessing posters, access to Divine Imperfections sculptures at up to 50% off, and more. It also includes our weekly newsletter filled with tidbits from our shop, family, and life as well as ceremony outlines, articles, sneak peeks, coupons, and special freebies.

Wednesday Tidbits: Life

Dec2

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Tanner’s hair is fuzzy and sticks straight up in the back. He is thirteen months old now and doesn’t say many words any more, just grunts and points (I remember this from others kids, so I’m not worried about the “regression.”) He wants to spend as much times as possible with me, ideally simultaneously destroying something I like at the same time. 😉 He helps stir when I’m cooking, he throws laundry into the machine, and he tries to put goddesses and business cards into purple bags.

We promoted ourselves to real adults and got our first ever brand new stove. Our other one had started to shock us somewhat roughly at random intervals (usually while cooking something in a saucepan with a metal handle. This went beyond a static electricity shock and into, “malfunctioning electronic equipment is electrocuting you” territory). We’ve never had a stove manufactured within the last three decades before! Exciting stuff!

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Talk Birth hit ONE MILLION HITS. I never would have dreamed that when I started this site for my local childbirth classes that it would reach this kind of growth. I was waiting for the day it hit one million (like watching the odometer on a car roll over to 100,000, or is that only me?!), but I missed it by 7,700 hits. Oops!

We put up our tree over the weekend and of course, I had to add Gingerbirth Mama back to the tree:

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My Little Women dolls also decorated my grandma’s dollhouse (gifted to me through the efforts of multiple relatives and their relatives earlier this year in a massive undertaking of travel from California to Missouri).

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We somehow shipped 360 orders in the month of November (ranging from one to 30 pieces)! It was a beautiful, thrilling, exhausting, exhilarating, overwhelming, inspiring, heart-expanding journey to create so many special ornaments and other treasures for our customers this season. We’re closing the shop for a winter break on December 20th and look forward to returning refreshed and energized from our own celebrations at home.

This photo was shared by one of our customers and I LOVE it so much!

We’re also going to do lots of brainstorming and work in our new Leonie workbook bundle that arrived at the end of November. I’m thrilled to get it, but too busy with the biz to really look at it yet!

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We enrolled in the Academy this year and it dramatically improved our business life, even though I feel like I’ve still barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer.

Alaina wanted to make “bear claw” cookies a few days ago so we made no bake cookies and stuck in slivered almonds for the claws:

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I’ve been having fun using my kids’ gel pens to color designs for bookmarks. I incorporated ‪Womanrunes into some of the mandalas from our goddess greeting card freebie bundle.

You can easily get your own cards to decorate (or just print and use!) here. We have a fun birthy one included too! (Mark drew all of them.)

And, speaking of Womanrunes, if you’re interested, I have a fun free 101 class available: Sign Up for Introduction to Womanrunes.

Happy December!

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(*Affiliate links included to Leonie’s stuff. Because it is Amaze.)

Tuesday Tidbits: Childbirth, Happiness, and The Sacred Feminine

Nov10

Three articles to read this week:

10 Unexpected Things To LOVE About Childbirth – Mothering. A lovely quote amidst several lovely quotes: “Contractions are beautiful in their own right. The peaks. The valleys. The steady, increasing rhythm of this glorious natural function. They are reflected countless times in the world around us, from the lapping of the ocean waves to the hills and valleys of nature, to the endless rhythm of the seasons. They come and go involuntarily, but unlike many other uncontrollable body functions, in the end you get a baby. Awesome.”

I’ve been heard to say: “maybe nothing really needs to change, just how I think needs to change.” And, my beloved Wayne Dyer always used to say: “when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. So, I appreciated this article about why complaining is bad for your health: “Therefore, your first mystical scientific evidence: your thoughts reshape your brain, and thus are changing a physical construct of reality.”

Source: The Science of Happiness: Why complaining is literally killing you. | Curious Apes

And, wow! A treasure-trove of links within this article:

But virtually every world religion has some revered mother figure — Durga (Hinduism), Tara (Buddhism), Rachel (Judaism), Mary (Christianity), Khadijah (Islam) — and even some newer religions have strong female mother figures, such as the Heavenly Mother in Mormonism. Scholars say many are linked to the prehistorical idea of the “sacred” or “divine feminine” — the worship and reverence of the female.

Is there something intrinsically spiritual or religious in motherhood? In the feminine? How might this be a bridge between different faiths? What role does the ancient concept of the sacred feminine continue to play in contemporary religions? In the religious and spiritual lives of contemporary women who are — and are not — mothers?

Source: Spiritual motherhood: Finding common ground in the ‘sacred feminine’ | ReligionLink

Other news:

We are participating in a fun pay-in-forward giveaway on Instagram via Mother From the Heart.

We’re also part of the Holiday Goddess Gift Guide | The Motherhouse of the Goddess:

Our Christmas ornament sales have been beyond what we imagined, so we’ve had to stop accepting orders until later this week to give us time to catch up!

Pumpkin Goddess Giveaway! (+ Baby Draco Malfoy)

Oct26

Announcing…The Great Pumpkin Goddess giveaway! In honor of Tanner’s first birthday on October 30th, we’re giving away this trio of birth goddesses in shades of fall. Enter the giveaway on Facebook or on Instagram.

It is hard to believe that this time last year I was one day away from my due date and now, look at this…

Draco Malfoy as a baby.

With that blonde hair, we simply could not resist.

Next up on the agenda, finish putting together his birth video! I really, really, really want to be able to post it on his birthday!

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Sign up for the Brigid’s Grove Newsletter for resources, monthly freebies, + art and workshop announcements.

Mother’s Day Giveaway!

May6

Our Mother’s Day celebration of motherhood continues with an awesome giveaway event! Four different goddess sculptures* and a copy of our Womanrunes book and card set. To win, simply leave a comment below (or on Facebook) letting us know which sculpture you’d like or if you’d like the book! For a bonus entry, subscribe to the Brigid’s Grove e-newsletter prior to Mother’s Day. Then, you’ll also get our Mother’s Day newsletter with free birth affirmation cards, centering handout, and several articles. 🙂

Still active is our coupon code MOTHER for $5 off a $15 purchase.

Giveaway will close on Mother’s Day evening and winners will be drawn by random selection on Monday.

(*giveaway contest sculptures are seconds with minor imperfections/flaws)

Tuesday Tidbits: Water (and some other things too)

Feb3

This week I was reminded of my past post exploring the question of whether water slows down labor:

“…But the weight of the water on a woman’s body also causes a ‘pooling’ effect in the blood vessels inside her chest, because the rib cage protects the lungs from the water-pressure squeeze exerted on the softer tissues of the limbs and abdomen. Over time this leads to a complicated hormonal chain reaction that results in decreased secretion of oxytocin, the uterine-contraction hormone, from the pituitary gland within the brain. With less oxytocin circulating than before she climbed in the tub, a woman’s labor can slow down significantly…”

Does Water Slow Down Labor? | Talk Birth.

I’ve only had one waterbirth myself and getting in the water did seem to slow my labor. I don’t feel like this was a bad thing necessarily because Tanner had a velamentous cord and it seems like a more sedate labor pace was probably better for him.

We recently finished casting some of my new watergathering goddess sculpture and I’m really happy with her!

This goddess is kneeling by the riverside, joyful that the springtime thaw is here and the waters flow freely once again. She is welcoming the new—the buds, the blossoms, the tender new shoots, the newborns, the vibrant wellspring of creation and delight.

via Watergathering Goddess Sculpture original by BrigidsGrove on Etsy.

After my positive experiences with Sacred Pregnancy and Sacred Postpartum, I’m taking the year-long Sacred Year course offered by the Sacred Living Movement. One of the projects for the first month is to make and drink “crystal water.” While I have an open mind about some things, I confess that ideas related to gem elixirs are definitely not one of them (they raise my “hokeylicious” alarm), so I was actually thinking of skipping the crystal water assignment, but today I decided to do it and it was actually quite delightful. I put a rose quartz heart in my water for joy, a tiny moonstone for small adventures, and an amethyst for healing. I used a cup that was made from a wine bottle from our wedding (and saved by my dad until our tenth anniversary. Now, we’re coming up on 17!). It felt like a symbolic vessel to use for my crystal water.

I listened to the first lesson for Sacred Year while holding a sleeping Tanner and working on grades for my class. One of the things I’ve learned is not to wait for the “perfect time,” so I set up my sacred spaces wherever and whenever I am!

Also while nursing my baby, I took my annual workplace “preventing harassment” training. While the training is well-done and includes lots of good information, I wish that the prevention strategies included: “don’t assault people,” “don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control them,” and “carry a whistle. If you are about to assault someone, blow it!” See: Asking the right questions… | Talk Birth.

Sort of speaking of asking questions, I enjoyed this post about the value of face-to-face breastfeeding meetings:

Here we are in 2015, and the moms of today are equipped with google and web md and can contact all their friends at once with a tap to a screen. Surely, with modern technology, we can access all information worth knowing. Surely, we are beyond the need to sit in a circle with other breastfeeding moms and their babies and toddlers. Aren’t we?

via The Value of Breastfeeding Meetings in the Age of Social Networking | Breastfeed Chicago.

I actually feel like I might not have survived early motherhood without La Leche League meetings. And, it was NOT actually because of the breastfeeding support, it was because of the other mothers. Those beautiful, kind, supportive, smart, and passionate other mothers!

We’ve been working recently on some larger pregnant goddess sculptures and hope to have some ready to go by the end of the week:

And, if you’re interested in a free handout on how to draw a Calamoondala, make sure you’re signed up for our Brigid’s Grove newsletter! The handout is included in our February newsletter.

Calamoondalas from the last four years!

Handmade Mama Holiday Giveaway!

Nov10

I have loved Home Baby Crafts for some time and have two of her beautiful tree pendants. So, I was delighted when Cassie messaged me about participating in a fun “handmade mama” holiday giveaway with several other nifty Etsy shops!

The giveaway features items from:

Brigid’s Grove (that’s us!)

Home Baby Crafts (amazing gemstone and wire tree jewelry as well as birth jewelry)

Monkey Mama Necklaces (nursing necklaces with neat resin beads)

EcoAlternatives (cloth pads and other reusable items)

Tanks Treasures (knit infinity scarves)

Make sure to check it out and enter to win! (Giveaway ends November 14th)