Posts Tagged ‘California Baby’

I give California Baby a whole lotta love on this website, for the simple reason that it totally rocks. The ingredients are natural and organic, the scents are divine and it’s affordable. In short, it’s an equal opportunity yummy-fest for mamas and their tykes.

If you’re a fellow “CB” fan, and happen to live on the west coast (specifically southern Cali), you’ll want to mark your calendar for a week from this coming Sunday. That’s the date of the company’s first-ever Family Festival, which will celebrate the opening of its new eco-friendly manufacturing facility and promises to be both super-fun and completely philanthropic. In fact, 100 percent of ticket sales will go to the Garden School Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to providing garden-based learning — think: hands-on exposure to nature — in “living classrooms” in L.A.

Because I’m Miss East Coast, here’s the fun Momover Lady will be missing on 10/10/10: Healthy snacks, green arts and crafts and, if I sprang for a VIP ticket, a chance to putter around the labs with company founder Jessica Iclisoy and concoct my very own Momover-ized version of a California Baby product.

Go, go, go and send me your sunshine-y L.A. vibes!

So we head for the awesomely family-friendly Mohonk Mountain House in the morning, and I am counting the nano-seconds until I scamper into that SUV. Even though I now live across the Hudson River from Gotham, it’s in my field of vision 24/7 and Mama needs a little break from all the steel and skyscraper action.

The thing about Mohonk that I really love is that it’s equal parts rustic and glam. Not glam-glam, mind you. But there’s a pretty gorge spa that is the perfect place for a mom (or at least this mom) to nip off to and hide from a Hubby and a Wee Lass. Last year, to reward myself for handing in the manuscript for my Momover book in a timely manner, I splashed-out on an “Ageless Aging Enzyme Facial” and an “Aroma-Massage,” which, as the name implies, thrusts several unspeakably lovely aromatherapy oils into the spotlight. (I believe in aromatherapy, big-time. To learn more about it, check out the most recent Mama Guru…)

This year, I haven’t quite decided what I’m doing spa-wise, but I’m definitely doing something. I figure I’ll just take a gander at the menu when we check in, and see what speaks to me. I’ve been feeling mystical lately, so I might just partake in a Reiki treatment. And the owner of Mohonk is a big meditator (she’s even written a great little how-to book on it), so I may pop by a class and get my Zen on.

But mostly, I’m sure I’ll be eating s’mores and paddle-boating on Lake Mohonk with the Little Lady, playing golf and tennis with Hubby (he’s about 1000 times better in both sports, but really, really nice about it…) and hiking my big fat ass off. Lots of hiking is in my immediate future, so much that I might actually even christen a cute pair of Vasque boots I bought several years ago and have yet to wear. A while back, I interviewed Jessica Iclisoy, the super-smart founder of California Baby, and she told me that she swears by Vasque for her daily treks through the canyons around her Beverly Hills home. Bingo – equal parts rustic and glam.

Another day, another this-stuff-will-kill-you warning.

As a mama bear who now has to report to her dermatologist every six months for skin screenings, and who also has a wee lass who never met a body of water she didn’t love, I often feel like my head might explode with all the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” chatter around sunscreen. So you can imagine my angst when I recently read the warnings about retinyl palmitate, a derivative of vitamin A that’s commonly used in umpteen million beauty products.

To get more insight into the retinyl palmitate brouhaha, I reached out to cosmetic ingredient expert Ron Robinson, Founder and CEO of Beauty Stat. He, of course, was already on the case, and had commissioned his crack team to investigate. You can read Beauty Stat’s take on the matter right here.

I firmly believe that all moms need to do the research regarding sunscreen ingredients, and come up with a gameplan for both themselves and their tots. I will say, however, that as a mother who is both a seasoned wellness journalist and a bigger and bigger proponent of natural ingredients every day, I’m personally leaning toward non-chemical sunscreens.

My favorite: California Baby. I am deeply, deeply in love with this brand anyway (I buy the Calming Shampoo & Bodywash by the truckload), but when summer rolls around, I have the CB sunscreens on me at all times. P.S. You can nab it at Target.