Midwifery, Andie Wyrick and Jaelin Stickels

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Midwifery, Andie Wyrick and Jaelin Stickels

A certified nurse midwife and doctorate student, Andie Wyrick has been in the Houston birth community for over a decade. Her experience includes elementary school nursing, hospital L & D, birth center, and home birth. Andie is confident in a woman’s ability to grow and birth her baby. She feels a partnership in care is empowering and hopes to foster that relationship with families. She has a tender, lighthearted, and hands-off approach to the evidence-based care she offers. She has been joyfully dating her husband of 18 years since junior high school and has five children. Her passions beyond bellies, birth, and breastfeeding are mission work and reading. Her claims to fame are winning fast money on Family Feud and having her nipple illustrated in Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding.

Jaelin Stickels is a certified nurse midwife and women’s health nurse practitioner who is honored to work with women and their families as they experience pregnancy, labor, birth, and the postpartum period. Jaelin followed her passion into midwifery and has been practicing with women and babies since 2010. She has spent the last 35 blissful years married to her high school sweetheart. She has three children and one grandchild. In addition to her passion for women’s health, she loves quilting and spends her spare time running the www.sheis.com website and being enamored with her granddaughter.

Kirsten Nottleson

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Kirsten Nottleson

Kirsten Nottleson is the proud mama of two sons, 13 and 19 years old. She is the owner and founder of Hand In Hand Workshops in Austin, Texas. She has been playing and working with children, parents, caregivers, and teaching professionals since 1993. Her focus is nurturing the relationship between children and their caregivers. Her topics include Play, Discipline, Sibling and Social Issues, Development, Classroom and Home Environment, Connection, Brain Science, Emotional Safety and Release, Laughter, Creativity, and Attachment.

She is passionate about Play, Emotional Release, and Connection. She understands that parents want their children to be happy, healthy, and have good, big lives. She sees that most parents are working under significant stress, with insufficient support. She helps parents understand their own history, build a support network, and add playfulness to their family life in order to parent more consciously and effectively. Kirsten LOVES teaching all kinds of workshops, especially ones that involve Play, Pillow Fights, and Wrestling.

She has worked extensively with families with substance abuse issues. She is especially proud of her Peer Education Parenting Curriculum that she helped develop and brought into 14 Texas prisons, training inmates to listen to one another to help each other heal. Her work is based on the Parenting by Connection Approach which she believes to be nothing short of Peace Movement in Action.

Linda Jones

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Linda Jones

Linda Jones is a birth and postpartum doula, photographer, and mother of two, grandmother of four and great-grandmother of three, who lives in Oakland, CA. She founded and owned Waddle and Swaddle Baby Boutique and Birth Resource Center in Berkeley, CA from 2000 to 2010 and has been a part of the natural birth advocacy and reproductive justice community in the Bay Area for almost three decades.

Linda is one of the co-founders of Black Women Birthing Justice (BWBJ) and is coauthor of Battling Over Birth and Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis in California.

Linda’s recent work has been centered around training and mentoring women of color to be doulas for low income women of color. This was started in 2014 when she was a part of the East Bay Community Birth Support Project. This group has gone on to morph into the Roots of Labor Birth Collective (RLBC). Linda was a part of the group that helped formulate this organization and hire the people that are now members of the collective. Her role now is as a support person.

Linda feels that the work she is now doing with BWBJ and RLBC, is adding to the fulfillment of the work she has done the past three decades. Helping families bring babies into the world and get their families started the best possible way has helped heal her own traumatic birth experiences.

Being able to potentially change how women of color presently are treated during birth makes her heart full.

Dr. Jennifer Harvey

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Dr. Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in Racially Unjust America

Dr. Jennifer Harvey is a writer, speaker, and professor of religion at Drake University where she also serves as Faculty Director for the Crew Scholars Program. She has a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Her work focuses primarily on racial justice and white anti-racism. Dr. Harvey’s most recent books include Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in Racially Unjust America (Abingdon Press) and Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Wm. B. Eerdmans). Dr. Harvey has contributed to the New York Times, CNN and been a guest on both Iowa and National Public Radio (including NPR’s “It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders”).

In the introduction to her book, she emphasizes the importance of white children understanding they are living in a country built by white people for white people and, as such, they need to be aware and acknowledge the privilege which is automatically conferred upon them. To create a society in which all the people in this country can experience equality, justice and fairness, requires white children to learn how to become allies to all those who do not have such privilege, instead of just accepting and embracing this privilege.

Diane Roche, PhD, LLC, Mama Guilt

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Diane Roche, PhD, LLC, Mama Guilt

Dr. Roche received her doctorate in clinical psychology, with an additional specialization in lifespan developmental psychology, from the APA and CPA accredited program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. In 1998, she moved to Houston, where she completed a pre-doctoral internship in clinical psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine and a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical psychology at the Houston Psychotherapy Institute.

Dr. Roche holds an appointment as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, where she participates in the education and training of clinical psychology interns. She has served as an Instructor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and has held an additional faculty appointment at Sam Houston State University. She has presented at numerous professional conferences and in community settings and has published research in peer-reviewed journals. A wife and mother of a middle schooler, she also has her own practice, Roche + Associates.

Andrea Olson, Elimination Communication

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Andrea Olson, Elimination Communication

Andrea Olson is the proud mama of five children – all ECed from birth, all out of diapers by walking – and owner of Go Diaper Free and Tiny Undies. When she started Elimination Communication with her first baby, she struggled with how to actually potty her newborn – where were all the visual, simple instructions…and were there any other parents doing EC? Since then, Andrea has made it super-simple for 100,000s of parents worldwide to start EC with their own babies, as early as birth…and has trained over 300 coaches to host EC communities across the globe. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her husband, five kiddos, sweet kitty, and (at last count) 18 backyard chickens.

Brook Knox, Probiotics for Infants

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Brook Knox, Probiotics for Infants

Brook Knox is a native Texan, who joins us from the Katy/Richmond area. She grew up in the Austin hill country and loves the slogan, “Keep it weird Austin.” From a young age she had an interest in food and by the age of 13 she took over cooking dinners for her family, so it was only natural she chose to get a degree in nutrition. Interestingly, she started college out as an Aggie for two years before transferring back to Austin where she graduated a Longhorn from the University of Texas and started a career as a registered dietitian, and after a couple of years she went back for a Master of Education at the University of Houston.

Her career as a registered dietitian has spanned from the inpatient hospital setting, to the community setting where she helped develop a childhood obesity program at the University of Houston, and she spent many years in outpatient at MD Anderson Cancer Center where she developed a strong interest for the microbiome. This eventually led her to join a small biotech company out of UC Davis called Evolve BioSystems where she represents a product supported by years of research called Evivo which is a unique probiotic for infants. Brook is the proud mother of a tall and artistic 12-year-old, Riley, and is blessed to have a very special man in her life, Andrew Guenther, who encourages her to grow personally and professionally every day.

Angelique Geehan, Babywearing and More

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Angelique Geehan

Angelique Geehan works as a consultant, trainer, and coach for families and professionals on diversity, cultural awareness, community building, and various parenting topics (like consent, difficult conversations and decision-making, and carrying babies, sometimes called “babywearing”). Her goal is to seed communities with as much critical thinking, compassion, and authenticity as possible, helping families get through their days more easily.

She founded Interchange, a consulting group that offers diversity and inclusion support. She volunteers for several organizations, including as president of the board of directors for Baby Carriers Provided, the non-board chair of the Baby Carrier Industry Alliance’s Educator Committee, a board member and community educator with Houston Babywearing Resource, and a drummer with Batalá Houston. She also organizes with the Houston Community Accountability and Transformative Justice Collective and the QTPOC+ Family Circle.