By now, you already know that with great love comes great joy . . . and great pain. It can be crazy-making! But it doesn't have to be.In Starry-Eyed, MOPS CEO Mandy Arioto reveals how the brightest and darkest moments of motherhood alike can become a sacred--and sanity-saving--opportunity to encounter God. There is a way to flourish in the midst of it all, and it starts with embracing the light and darkness in life with expectation and awe.Heartening, enchanting, and always unflinchingly honest, Starry-Eyed will show you how to find the unexpected grace in your life as a woman, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend. Consider this your heart-to-heart sit-down with a woman who’s been there, and can help you find fresh eyes to see how beauty and pain can mingle with purpose.

    Breastfeeding nightmares, eating dinner with one hand, soft play hell and chronic sleep deprivation - but also the sheer beauty of falling in love again and the amazing discovery of what it's like to have a family - these are all captured in Sketchy Muma's glorious drawings.This is the perfect gift book for both young and experienced parents. Anna Lewis understands the light and shade that comes with motherhood, and it is those universal truths that will connect all those parents who delight in her sketches.

    She loved Je’Marcus Watford past his flaws and stayed loyal, even when he failed to put her first. She dove head first into their young love, allowing Je’Marcus to be her lifeline when her mother abandoned her to chase the street life, but when the smoke clears and those blinders come off, Aniqa finds herself living a heart-breaking nightmare. Hoping to give her baby girl, Essence, the world, Aniqa is faced with a tough decision: move on from Je’Marcus’ abusive love drought, or stay blindly committed to a disloyal dude. There’s just one problem, though: the only way Je’Marcus plans to let her go is through death. Linc Carmichael is a low key boss that wants no parts of the L word. Determined to take the family business to the next level, he plays it close to the chest when dealing with chicks. He sticks to chicks that don’t expect a commitment and has one main rule: no chicks with kids. That all goes out the window when he meets Aniqa; her natural beauty and heart of gold bring Linc to his knees, and he knows he has to have her—no matter who has to die in the process. Crushed is what you feel when love don’t love you back, but Linc just might be the one to renew Aniqa’s faith in love when she finds herself Crushin’ on a Boss....

    What can be a better way than "hearing" about it from your baby himself? Being pregnant is both an incredible privilege and significant event in the lives of women that are fortunate enough to carry a child. While it's a time filled with wonder and hope, it's also marked by dramatic physical and emotional changes and major decisions. For each of those 42 weeks, you'll get an insider's perspective - that is, your baby's view - on how he or she is developing inside the womb and what changes you might be seeing or feeling. This book is also available in a journal format!

    

    A child is born, chaos ensues, and it seems like life will never return to normal.In You Are a F*cking Awesome Mom, award-winning journalist and Instagram star Leslie Anne Bruce acknowledges that, yes, motherhood is a total mind f*ck—but then she offers the self-empowerment lessons new mothers need to get through the psychic upheaval and emerge stronger than ever. After childbirth, a woman's body, her relationships, and her very sense of self are tested like never before. Bruce encourages readers to look past the sugarcoated truisms about the miracles of child-rearing in order to embrace the real joys of motherhood, spit-up stains and all.Loaded with unfettered support from a mom who has been through it all, You Are a F*cking Awesome Mom offers a lifeline of encouragement, inspiration, and community for the new mama who got a baby, lost her mind, and desperately wants to find herself again.

    Are all these C-sections necessary, or are some of them done simply for the sake of convenience? Inductions seem to be the norm, but are they always needed? Today, expectant mothers are often left feeling powerless, as their instincts are replaced by drugs and routine medical procedures. What you are about to discover is that you have a choice, and you have the power to plan the kind of birth that's right for you-whether it is at a birth center, a hospital, or at home. In YOUR BEST BIRTH, internationally known advocates of informed choice RickiLake and Abby Epstein inspire women to take back the birth experience, with essential advice on:· Positive and negative effects of epidurals, Pitocin, and other drugs and interventions · Inducing vs. allowing your labor to progress naturally · The truth behind our country's staggering C-section rate · Assembling your birth team and creating your birth plan.With chapters such as "Obstetricians: Finding Dr. Right," "Epidurals: You Haven't Got Time for the Pain," and "Electronic Monitors: Reading between the Lines," Lake and Epstein will encourage you to consider whatever your doctor, mother, and best friend may suggest in a new light. The book also includes inspiring birth stories, including those from well-known personalities, such as Laila Ali and Cindy Crawford. Packed with crucial advice from childbirth professionals, and delivered in a down-to-earth, engaging voice, YOUR BEST BIRTH is sure to renew your confidence and put the control back where it belongs: with parents-to-be!"Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake have taken a wonderful and constructive approach to ensuring an optimal birthing experience. Their language creates a 'climate of confidence' for pregnant women and their families, who must make key decisions about where, how and with whom to give birth in a health care system often unresponsive to our needs. This book is like a good friend giving wise counsel." --Judy Norsigian, co-editor of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth and Executive Director, Our Bodies Ourselves

    A national bestseller with more than 750,000 copies in print, now revised for the new mothers of the '90s -- the latest findings on health, advice for working mothers, facts about the influence of TV, and more.B & W illustrations throughout.

    Clearly newborns don’t need to be “trained” how to sleep – they know how, and they’ve had plenty of practice. So why do most parents have trouble getting their newborns to sleep?Elizabeth Pantley, a world-renowned expert on children’s sleep, created this guide to explain the ways we unintentionally prevent an infant’s natural sleep to occur, and to teach us the simple but powerful ways to maximize our newborn’s naps and nighttime sleep. Once you’ve learned the 15 Keys to Amazing Newborn Sleep you’ll easily make adjustments to how you treat your baby’s sleep. You don’t have to keep logs nor follow schedules or rules. Just by being aware of this information you will do things to improve sleep that you wouldn’t have known to do otherwise.With The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Newborns, you will learn:• the things that trick us into disrupting a baby’s sleep• how to identify the perfect moment for a nap• ways to create a sleep-inducing environment • tips to reduce the number of night wakings• how to set the stage for great sleep throughout babyhoodThe No-Cry Sleep Solution for Newborns was field-tested by 122 test families with newborns. Their input refined the ideas to make them easy to understand and follow – by even the most sleep-deprived parent. When you apply these Keys you can help your baby sleep well and peacefully. And guess what? When your baby sleeps – you will, too!

    It’s the feminist issue nobody’s talking about.For too long women have been told, ‘a healthy baby is all that matters’. This book dares to say women matter too.Finally blasting the feminist spotlight into the labour ward, Milli Hill encourages women everywhere to stand and deliver, insisting that birth is no longer left off the list in discussions about female power, control and agency.From the importance of birth plans to your human rights in childbirth, and including birth stories from women across the world, this call-to-arms will help you find your voice, take an active role in your choices, and change the way you think about childbirth.Praise for Give Birth Like a Feminist‘I feel so lucky to have read Milli’s book while pregnant, she completely changed my way of looking at giving birth’ Ella Mills, author of Deliciously Ella

    Explaining that parents can never get over the loss of a child, a psychologist and bereaved parent offers strategies by which parents can accept and integrate the effects of trauma into their lives.

    The fun and easy-to-follow guide to potty training even the most stubborn child just 3 daysLora shares the method she put together in a step-by-step book that has children potty trained in just 3 short days.  Not just for pee and poop but for day and night too!  Lora’s method is all about training the child to learn their own body signs.  If the parent is having to do all the work, then the child isn’t truly trained, but with Lora’s method your child will learn when their body is telling them that they need to use the potty and they will communicate that need to you.

    and we will find them less confusing, and love them more deeply...Mothers of sons are worried about raising their boys in a world where negative images of masculinity are front and centre of our media, almost every day. Not only that, but statistically our boys are still struggling in many ways.Even though we live in a time where we recognise that nothing in gender is fixed, it remains a fact that the influence of a mother on her son is massive.A mother of four sons herself, Maggie Dent draws on her personal experience - and over four decades work as a teacher, counsellor and now author and speaker - to help build understanding, empathy and compassion for our boys. Maggie shares her five key secrets that every mum needs to know, and uses the voices of men she has worked with and surveyed to reveal what really matters in a boy's relationship with his mother and other mother figures.Maggie is one of Australia's most popular parenting educators and her seminars about boys have sold out all across Australia and in the UK. She is finally sharing her insights, her reflections, and (as always) her humour around mothering boys in this book that will help you be the mum your son needs you to be.

    For women who want an alternative, choice is often unavailable: Midwives are sometimes inaccessible; in eleven states they are illegal. In one of those states, even birthing centers are outlawed.When did birth become an emergency instead of an emergence? Since when is normal, physiological birth a crime? A groundbreaking journalistic narrative, Pushed presents the complete picture of maternity care in America. Crisscrossing the country to report what women really experience during childbirth, Jennifer Block witnessed several births - from a planned cesarean to an underground home birth. Against this backdrop, Block investigates whether routine C-sections, inductions, and epidurals equal medical progress. She examines childbirth as a reproductive rights issue: Do women have the right to an optimal birth experience? If so, is that right being upheld? Block's research and experience reveal in vivid detail that while emergency obstetric care is essential, there is compelling evidence that we are overusing medical technology at the expense of maternal and infant health: Either women's bodies are failing, or the system is failing women.

    Now you can learn how to photograph children with the style, clarity, color, and beauty you see in professional photographs. This fun guide combines humor with solid know-how to show you how to compose shots, handle cameras from basic compacts to advanced dSLRs, take portraits or candids, create prints that impress, and even work with kids Packed with beautiful examples and written in a down-to-earth style from one mom to another, this book will help mamarazzis everywhere take better photos.Moms are one of the fastest-growing segments of the camera-toting demographic, and the blogosphere has a term for them, "mamarazzis"Mixes information, inspiration, and fun for women who want to take better photographs of the children in their livesExplains how to set up a camera and use the controls on basic compacts up to advanced dSLR camerasCovers shot composition, determining settings, exposing images correctly, the essentials of printing images, how to process for clear and bright color, and moreIncludes stunning examples of portraits and candids of childrenBecome a better mamarazzi with this fun and informative guide