The story of our Motherhood Center is one that I hold very close to my heart as its roots stemmed from a need that I recognized while working with families when I first moved to the United States from my hometown in the Czech Republic. Upon moving, I worked as a Postpartum Doula (Baby Nurse). I was given the opportunity to meet so many amazing families and was able to learn about their different family lifestyles and dynamics through my hands-on experience.
I primarily worked at night, and often, when an assignment came to its end, I was faced with teary goodbyes from the many moms and dads I found myself working with. I was the one in their home helping them during such a very special, but vulnerable, time as they were adjusting to their new reality as parents and learning how to care for their new precious addition. When it was time for me to move on to help the next family I was often asked, “what are we supposed to do now?”
During my time working as a Postpartum Doula, I acted as a member of their village of support, their educator, and nurturer. This was when I noticed the need for a place where families can find support, guidance, education, reassurance, and nurturing all under one roof versus trying to find those resources at different institutions all across town; and this is what sparked my idea for our Motherhood Center.
When I first opened the center, I had already established a Postpartum Doula program named, Loving Infant Care, which merged with our Motherhood Center once we opened. Some of the initial services we offered were prenatal yoga, mom and baby yoga, and prenatal massages. Following establishing those services, I immediately started to work on developing curriculums for Newborn Care, Breastfeeding, and Infant Massage classes. I hired instructors to join our team to teach our Childbirth Education and CPR classes and was helping to teach many of the educational classes myself initially. However, I soon realized that I needed to add more instructors and educators to join our team.
As we worked on creating this unique new concept to support moms and their families, we based the services we offer around listening to our client’s needs and our intuition. Over the past 20 years, we have expanded our classes and services. We offer our babysitting service, nanny, and family assistant placement service, Grandparent’s Refresher classes, labor support, children’s programs, parenting classes, and we even offer a 2-day nanny school program. My passion for pregnancy, the newborn and toddler stage, coupled with my passion for business, eagerness to learn, and willingness to adapt, allowed our Motherhood Center to evolve and be a pillar for our nearing 30,000 clients.
In recent months, we started to explore the opportunities to expand beyond our one center. Although we are still working on that and are unable to share more details on it (yet), we have continued to adapt and evolve in response to the unfortunate situation that we have all been facing due to COVID-19, and we now offer a variety of virtual education, fitness, and parenting classes. We offer our virtual Growing Together class, Baby Bump Social, pre and postnatal yoga classes, and even virtual services such as our labor support and lactation services. With our virtual classes and services, we have been able to continue to support our Houston moms and their families during this challenging time, and we are now also supporting families in other cities, states, and countries!
I am so grateful and thankful to all of our parent educators, yoga and fitness instructors, massage therapists, lactation consultants, and of course, our phenomenal caregivers and center team members. It’s been a wonderful journey, and I am excited about the opportunities ahead of us!
