{This post is featured on Blog Nosh Magazine today!}
I was certain the unbearable desert heat was actually pressing in on my little car as I drove home from work. It felt thick to drive through, too thick to breathe, heavy with the weight of impending rain and the coming monsoons. I peered at the blue sky through my windshield. Not a cloud in sight. I killed the ignition, and swung my legs out of the comfort of the air conditioned car, my green bowl positioned on my lap. I was six months pregnant and still throwing up a dozen times a day.
A wave of nausea rolled through me as the Arizona heat hit me like a brick wall. I closed my eyes, leaning my head against the still cool seat belt strap. I’d already had to pull over twice on the 202 to vomit on the side of the road; surely even my stomach couldn’t find anything else to reject. I bit back the almost automatic dry heaving and focused on getting out of the car. Hoisting two grocery sacks, I trudged up the three flights of stairs and let myself into our tiny apartment.
My husband was there, sitting on the couch, still wearing his concrete covered work clothes. I stood stupidly in the doorway, surprised to see him home so early. His eyes moved from my growing belly to my face.
“I got laid off today.”
The next month was insane. The monsoons came and rattled the windows and sent desert sand swirling away in muddy streams across sidewalks and down gutters. My husband worked when he could, begging for freelance cement jobs while he argued with his old employer about severance pay. He lined up jobs to help us pad our meager savings and I packed our little apartment, sold furniture, sorted out a replacement for the nanny job I had, and threw up every five minutes.
Pregnant and packing boxes; not my idea of a good time.
Finally we had our lives packed into my husband’s work trailer and truck and we set our sights for home.
—
Back in Utah we rented a storage unit that cost a precious $20 per month, wedged our marriage bed into the little room I grew up in in the basement of my parent’s house and tried to look on the bright side. My husband spent weeks sending out resumes boasting about his degree and the company he’d owned and tried not to let the deafening silence of the phone drive him mad.
In desperation, he took a job at a car dealership that paid him $1000 a month on top of commissions. As the summer months turned to fall months, those promised commissions grew more and more less frequent. I spent the last uncomfortable months of my pregnancy working as a nurse at an internal medicine office, waddling in and out of patient rooms, taking blood pressure readings, and administering injections to make ends meet.
Whether we were ready or not, it was time to welcome our baby boy into the world — a world we hoped we’d be able to improve, a world we hoped would soon lead us out of my childhood bedroom and into a home of our own.
We were so poor I scoured eBay and second hand shops for baby things and considered cloth diapering to save money; but we’d received a few months worth of diapers from generous friends and relatives so I put the thought out of my mind. We might need to clip coupons like mad, but there wasn’t any reason to go crazy rinsing poopy diapers out by hand, right?
Wrong. Well, kind of wrong.
My baby ended up developing a dreadful rash in each and every brand of disposable diaper we tried. Creams and ointments did nothing, the blisters looked awful. We tried a round of yeast medication but finally our pediatrician said we ought to look into cloth diapers.
I fired up my brother’s old computer and sorted out how to connect to the internet. An hour or two later, I was lost in Google. Cloth diapers had changed – they no longer required pins and crinkly, leaky plastic pants. They fastened with Velcro and plastic snaps. They were, dare I say, cute? If my calculations were correct, we could not only single handedly save the planet, but also save around $2000 by using cloth.
But I couldn’t afford the initial investment – in spite of the long term benefits, so I kept searching until I found a couple of websites with instructions for sewing my own diapers.
My husband was less than enthused at the prospect, but I got to work. My mom and I cut up old blankets, utilized old dish towels, and sewed my baby some cloth diapers to try. Within a few days, my baby’s rash was better; it was amazing. But I was struggling to find affordable diaper fabric and other specialty notions I could use to make effective waterproof covers for the diapers I’d made. Local fabric shops just didn’t have what I needed and looked at me like I was crazy when I explained what I was trying to make.
More online searches led me to a smallish cloth diapering community where women shared resources for buying diaper making fabrics and supplies, but it looked like I’d have to wait weeks and weeks to get what I needed through co-ops, plus I would need to purchase the items from multiple places from multiple people – the shipping costs were adding up and wrecking my delicately balanced budget.
One night, lying in bed with our tiny, cloth diapered baby between us, I mused, “What if I opened an online shop? A place where moms like me could find hard to find cloth diaper making supplies all in one spot? No waiting, no shipping fee pile up… What do you think?”
My husband stifled a yawn and kissed our baby’s head. “Sounds like a sweet little something you might could do on the side.”
He wasn’t being discouraging, just honest. The cloth diapering community was small, and even smaller was the community within that community who chose to sew diapers themselves rather than buy ready made.
I began searching and sourcing, and making contacts, and constructing spreadsheets until I had a 3 ring binder packed to overflowing with data and plans. I presented my plan to my parents; my dad was supportive but smiled a little. I knew it sounded crazy – the percentage of parents who chose to cloth diaper was already dwarfed by the percentage of parents who chose to use paper diapers. How much smaller would the percentage of parents be who actually chose to sew those cloth diapers?
Miniscule at best. But still, I could see a need, and so I pressed on.
My parents weren’t able to help at the time, but my husband’s parents generously gave us some start up money, as no bank would approve us for any kind of loan given our current laid off / car salesman / parent’s basement situation. I planned carefully and made our initial purchases. Soon I had rolls of fabric lying around and a website and a shopping cart that could accept Paypal payments.
After months and months of planning, I held my breath and launched my little website.
Two days later, orders were shooting out of the printer, I was cutting fabric on the floor from a gigantic roll of microfleece, and my baby was crying for his lunch. I called my husband in tears, “You’ve got to come home and help me.”
Our first ‘shop’ in a tiny one car garage.
It didn’t take much to convince him — he wasn’t really a good car salesman anyway. He quit his job with glee, and has been working alongside me ever since. Eight years later, he’s still cutting and shipping diaper fabric all over the world.
Our second ‘shop’ in a bit larger two car garage.
Our business grew. We were able to move out of my parent’s basement and after two more rental places, we bought some land in Idaho where we could build a big shop next to our home. When neighbors ask what the big shop is for, expecting my husband to maybe fix cars or to build furniture, he grins, points to me, and says, “I work for her.”
Shortly after our current shop was built, ahhh the space!
We are still a very small scale business. We have one part time employee, but my husband does the bulk of the work while I manage the website, customer forums, and the social media for the business. My children help daddy in the shop after our homeschool lessons are finished for the day. They play hide and seek in the big boxes our elastics come in, and run off with remnant fabric to make super hero capes with.
We thank the Lord everyday that this little business, this little thing we thought I could maybe do on the side, has turned into something that supports us, feeds us, and makes it possible for us to live and work together. And even though aspects of running our own business can be hard and wearying, we’re oh so grateful to be doing what we’re doing, living the sadly fading, proverbial American Dream.
This post was inspired by Margaret Rudkin, founder of Pepperidge Farm. Margaret discovered her talent for business by stepping up to solve a problem in her own life. The stock market had crashed and her son had food allergies and asthma which required good foods that were difficult to obtain. Margaret set about creating a company that made high quality food her son could eat and in so doing, found a way to provide for her family during tough times.
I’m publishing my entrepreneurial story in honor of Margaret Rudkin and Mother’s Day. This post is sponsored by Blog Nosh Magazine as part of the Blog Nosh Magazine and Pepperidge Farm Celebrate the Heart and Art of Motherhood carnival.
Visit Pepperidge Farm to download handy coupons, and read about their generous $10,000 donation to Feeding America and how you can help this cause.
Finally, post your own story during the Month of May to participate! Visit Blog Nosh at BlogNosh.com for details about the carnival.
