By KAREN PETERS

When my first son was born, I didn’t think twice about running out and purchasing the usual fare: petroleum jelly, baby oil, and the moisturizer that we all associate with that magical “baby smell.” I had about seven or eight baby bags already packed with all these products—everything I thought I needed to take care of my baby. For sure, I believed that the products everyone else was using would be best for my new baby.

It didn’t occur to me that the typical baby products would contain harsh, toxic, or carcinogenic ingredients, but I was wrong; when I finally started reading the labels, my eyes were opened to another reality entirely. It really snapped me out of my new mommy daze and made me remember that I was born knowing everything I needed to know about how to incorporate more natural products into my baby’s skin care regimen. After all, the wise mothers who came before me embraced nature as they cared for their children, and an internship in the bush of Cameroon, Africa, inspired me to start mixing up natural and organic shea butters and essential oils and herbs in the lab, a.k.a. my kitchen. I’ve long created natural, simple, freshly made, healthy products for grownups who shunned ingredients that were deemed toxic, irritating, or cancer-causing (and believe me, there were thousands of them).

Right then and there, I got “the wake up call” and started fashioning some of my grownup products for my baby’s delicate skin. Everything I blended for him was natural and had no more than four or five ingredients. When it was bath or bedtime, he would coo and ooh about our annointing rituals using the wonderful, safe products that I made especially for him—one of the best, most powerfully nurturing gifts that I could offer him. I could rest easy knowing that I was massaging his skin with healthy, nourishing baobab fruit seed oil instead of coating it with a by product of gasoline and kerosene (mineral oil, also known as baby oil). It did me and my baby good to soothe his mild eczema with shea butter and lavender instead of flammable, chemically-treated hydrocarbons (petroleum jelly). He and I were happier cleansing his tender little arms and legs with a wash made from olive and coconut oil instead of antifreeze and solvent ( 1, 4 dioxane is found in more than half of the baby washes on the market and is an ingredient used to make coolant and bubbles).

Now that all of my boys are past the baby stage—my youngest is 3, yeah!—and I no longer blend baby care products in my kitchen, I literally make it my business to share what I know with other mothers and encourage the blending of something sweet and beautiful for babies. Now I host Honey B.U.N.S. (Babies Use No Synthetics) gatherings where a bunch of us mothers get together around our sacred blending pots and add a lot of love, blessings, and super simple ingredients to create some of the most incredibly nurturing baby washes, oils, and lotions for special, spiritual and most perfect beings—our babies!

Here, a simple but special recipe you can make all on your own—safe for you and your babies. It’s simply delicious. Enjoy!

Basic Recipe for Gentle Massage Oil

What you’ll need:
16 oz. jojoba oil (this oil is most similar to the components in human sebum, our inherent moisturizer.)
16 oz. sweet almond oil (moisturizing and gentle; easily absorbed)
16 drops of lavender essential oil (this is not fragrance, but a pure essential oil for soothing any skin ailment)*
8 drops of Roman chamomile (this is not a fragrance, but a pure essential oil for calming)*
4 4-ounce bottles
1 32-ounce jar

The mix:
Pour all ingredients into the 32 ounce bottle or jar; shake well and pour evenly into the four, 4-ounce bottles. Enjoy massaging your baby with this special, delicious elixir.

Note: Natural does not always mean best for your baby. There are some babies who are sensitive to many things, including ingredients that come from the Earth, such as essential oils. If your baby is prone to allergic reactions or has sensitive skin, simply use jojoba oil without essential oils. Also, please note that all ingredients with the exception of the jars can be purchased at Whole Foods or your local health food store.

About our MyBrownBaby contributor
Karen Peters is founder of The Peace & Beauty Project, a nonprofit organization that encourages girls to honor natural beauty while making health conscious decisions. On Wednesday, November 11 at 5 p.m., she will host a “Babies & Bubbles Baby Care Workshop” to help moms learn about the ingredients that are safe for babies’ skin. To learn more about Karen’s organization and her workshop, click HERE or call 407.339.7529.

I’ve loved her blog, like, forever and when Jennifer, a.k.a., Future Mama of the fertility and mommy-to-be blog, Baby Makin(g) Machine, hopped in the Chevy to road trip to BlogHer ‘09 with The BlogRollers and me, my instincts about her were cemented: She is an absolute sweetie pie—smart, inquisitive, and well on her way to being a terrific mom.

I told you last week in my MyBrownTribe post that Jennifer decided in the last few months to try for her first child; she’s been chronicling the joys, challenges and frustrations of trying to get pregnant on her site, and, in her short journey, has found that making a baby isn’t as easy as she thought. To lift her spirits while she and her husband of five years keep trying, Jennifer decided to follow her mom’s sage advice: “There’s no better way to lift yourself up than to serve others.” So now, BabyMakin(g) is turning her thoughts and deeds to helping a wonderful charity whose goal is to help women make and keep healthy babies: the March of Dimes.

Jennifer’s hope is to raise $1,000 in 30 days; with the support of a bevy of outstanding sponsors, she’ll be raffling off prizes to those who donate money. Every single penny she collects will go to the March of Dimes.

Won’t you support Jennifer as she works to raise money for this most worthy cause? I can’t think of a more generous gift than that which goes toward helping mothers and their children. If you’d like to donate or show your support for Baby Makin(g) Machine, click HERE.

And…

If you’re feeling in an extra benevolent mood today, won’t you consider, too, helping to raise cash for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, in support of students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities? For every auto insurance quote Allstate receives during the month of September, they’ll donate $5 to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. To make the quote count, you have to click to Allstate through THIS DEDICATED LINK; if you’d like to post this fundraiser on your own blog, tweet it, or simply email your folks and encourage them to help out, use the following link: http://www.beyondfebruary.com/. This program runs through September 30th.

MyBrownBaby is so very honored to support these two great causes; as you consider chipping in, I hope that you, too, take Jennifer’s mom’s words to heart: “There’s no better way to lift yourself up than to serve others.”

I took Mari—my first-born, my sweet girl, my baby—school shopping this weekend… in the ladies’ section. It seems my days of buying pretty little dresses and jeans embellished with sparkles and rainbows are numbered.

And now, my heart is broken.

And I have the shakes.

Because my Mari—my first-born, my sweet girl, my baby—is only 10.

Ten, dammit.

And I just wasn’t prepared to watch my 10-year-old daughter suffer through the gut-wrenching fitting-room agony of having to squeeze and pull and stretch into a children’s clothing size that officially is no longer available to her. With her little sister flitting about in one super-cute outfit after the other, Mari and I had to fold each of the near dozen pants I’d hauled into the fitting room and put them back on the shelf. Our march from GapKids to just the plain ol’ Gap was a reluctant and slow one; I did a decent job of hiding my tears, but my sadness was unmistakable: When—and how!—did my 10-year-old child get too big for a size 14?

She is athletic and active—a lover of pasta, but also healthy portions of rainier cherries and juicy nectarines, sautéed string beans and okra and even brussels sprouts. She’s not prone to snacking, and would just as soon drink water than suck down punch and carbonated drinks. Even at her tender age, Mari is conscious about how her food choices can help or harm her body, and so really, she’s done nothing to warrant being banished to the land of low-cut tops and barely-covering-the-crack jeans reserved for the more daring—the more adult.

No, this is my fault. My baby’s inherited her mother’s blessed/cursed curves—the wide hips and the thick thighs and the uber-round bubble booty and the tiny waist that render good pants fits virtually impossible, sans a paycheck’s worth of cash wasted on tailors charged with getting the clothes to fit right.

And I feel absolutely horrible about this.

And helpless.

I remember what it was like to have to bypass all the cute, colorful clothes in the Garanimals section at Penny’s and Macy’s and go down the escalator to the junior’s section with my mom; as I recall, she wasn’t too thrilled about the switch, either, and made a point of letting me know this by not-so-subtly suggesting I lay off the Oreos and do some exercise so I could get back into the children’s section. Mind you, I was skinny as a rail, save for the butt and hips, but it was exactly that, I think, that scared my mom. She was a black mom in America, after all, with intimate knowledge of what black men—specifically young black men—lust after: hips and booty. I think that in her mind, the bigger mine got, the more chance some little boy would pounce on her daughter, opening her up to a cascade of hormone-driven, adolescent problems—a literal ticking time-bomb that could lead to, at best, having to mend her daughter’s broken heart, at worst, having to change a grandbaby’s diaper.

Bettye wasn’t trying to be anybody’s grandma—at least not until her daughter graduated college, found herself a good job with a good paycheck and good benefits, and exchanged her “I do’s” with a man who was ready, willing, and able to care for a family of his own.

And so she set about building her own personal dam to stem the tide of adolescence: She commenced to doing everything she could to convince me that boys weren’t an option. By forbidding me to date. And insisting I stay in the house huddled beneath her and my Dad instead of out at the roller skating rink or the bowling alley or the mall with my friends. And by making me feel like my hips and bubble butt were a problem—something that wasn’t natural. That needed correcting. I can still remember the day she came into my room and suggested I walk backward on my butt to make it “flatten out a little.” I can still remember, too, how frustrated and angry I got when, after weeks of scooting across my rough beige carpet, the only thing I’d accomplished was giving myself rug burn and a really bad self-esteem issue that lasted way into my early 20s, when I finally gave up trying to hide all of this under big shirts, thick sweaters and baggy pants.

My ass was—and always will be—big and wide and round.

And there was no amount of scooting or camouflaging that was going to change that.

It is this that I kept repeating to myself as I walked Mari to the women’s section at The Gap—over to the sale rack, in a desperate search for size 0 women’s shorts with kid, not adult, price tags. It is not her fault that she’s got my hips and thighs and butt. And there is nothing I can do to change them.

What I can do, though, is encourage her to accept and love the curves God’s thrown her way, all the while helping her to hold on to that innocence. Nick and I are doing a pretty good job of it; when we recently asked her to describe herself in a word, she said, “strong.” This much is true: She gleefully dives into physical competitions with her precociously athletic cousin, and even sometimes bests him. She also loves to sweat, and run, and make her body do things that most 10-year-old girls already are too self-conscious to try. Right now, she’s focused more on all the great things it can do, rather than the problems it can cause.

I’ll help her keep her eyes on that prize—to help her sidestep the black girl booty baggage, even as her 10-year-old body does its not-so-slow march to Beyonce bootylicious womanhood. Thank God, she still enjoys wrapping herself up in the intricacies of a new SpongeBob episode and the wonder of erecting a fantastically colorful chalk city in the middle of our concrete driveway.

She is still a little girl.

And for this, I am grateful, even if we do have to bid size 14 a sad farewell.