Soul Sustenance: Moms Helping Moms

In the upbeat Moms Helping Moms video, real moms talk about how important it is for moms to support each other.  Parenting is a tough job, but knowing other moms are on each other’s side makes it so much easier.  Mothers talk about how relating and encouraging each other make them feel better, feel less alone and help them realize there’s no perfect parent; everyone is just doing the best they can.  Moms who are clearly dear friends share that it's just that, the friendship with other moms that shifts the experience of motherhood from overwhelming to doable. Mothers of all ages are featured in the video and among the women featured is Glennon Doyle Melton, the New York Times bestselling author of Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy Beautiful Life, award-winning blogger and founder of Momastery.com. 

Glennon revealed, “While parenting is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done, it is also the most brutally difficult thing I’ve ever done. And the single thing that I have found, that makes it easier, is finding another honest group of women to admit together how hard it is and to let the hard bring us together to ask each other for help. Because I think that we were really, really meant to walk through all of these parts of our lives [as] parents, [in] parenthood, even marriage, all of these things, with a tribe.”

About Count the Kicks:In 2009, five Iowa moms who all lost baby daughters within months of each other, launched Count the Kicks, the public awareness campaign that's recently gone global thanks to a new kick counting app found in the iTunes and Google Play online stores. Scientific studies indicate kick counting, a daily record of a baby's movements (kicks, rolls, punches, jabs) during the third trimester, is an easy, free and reliable way to monitor a baby's well-being in addition to regular prenatal visits.

Count the Kicks teaches expectant parents the importance of monitoring their unborn baby's movements during the third trimester of pregnancy with the goal of improving the chances of delivering a healthy baby and can prevent unexpected birth complications and even late-term stillbirth. 

Through their non-profit organization Healthy Birth Day, the women have created a network of supportive hospitals, doctors and advocates who are spreading the Count the Kicks message.  Prior to the development of Count the Kicks, the five founding women helped get Iowa's Stillbirth Registry law enacted and they now have Count the Kicks ambassadors in twelve states.

About Healthy Birth Day:Healthy Birth Day is a nonprofit organization, run entirely by volunteer moms, dedicated to preventing stillbirths and infant deaths through education, advocacy and parent support.  Founded in 2003 by five Iowa mothers (Kate Safris, Kerry Biondi-Morlan, Rep. Janet Petersen, Tiffan Yamen, Jan Caruthers) who met after each losing a daughter to stillbirth or infant death,  Healthy Birth Day has helped with getting Iowa’s Stillbirth Registry law enacted (which has brought more than $2 million into Iowa for stillbirth prevention research), created a parent-to-parent network to reach out to grieving families immediately following their loss of their babies, and launched the “Count the Kicks” public health campaign to help prevent stillbirths.