The Natural Family Company
My Home business, The Natural Family Company is a for profit venture that I have run out of my home since 1995.
This blog entry is an advertisement for the various products, services, and materials that I have available for purchase from my company. I also wanted to share the history of this endeavor.
History of The Natural Family Company
Andy and Jeff “helping” with the baking!
About the time of this picture in 1997 I was beginning to realize that my home business was not going to fit into my life anymore. I was up to my ears in breastfeeding and although I was fully dedicated to the previous eight years work, which encompassed teaching my Bradley Childbirth Class, selling Cloth Diapers, Slings, and Environmentally safe products, as well as acting as Doula for as many births as I could fit into my schedule, life with four young children was just too involved to allow me to do this joyful work.
Paul had hooked us up to the internet in 1996, and I was starting to get a feel for the type of outreach that was possible through the web. I joined a chat room for LDS Unassisted Birthers about this time and quickly realized that the other women were very interested in my information. Mary, the moderator of the group, challenged me to write a book. I had been realizing for months that I kept writing the same posts over and over again in response to the same questions from various women in the group.
So, in 1999 I began. I started by writing my book, A Mothers Journey. I set up a web site called Millennial Family and began marketing the book on the web. That web site failed and I took it down. Then in late 1999 I conducted a survey of our on line group of mormon women and wrote my second book, Elijah Birth. On January 1,2000 I registered my Trade Name, The Natural Family Company with the State of Colorado and was back in business.
Not that anything really happened financially, sales were slow and I was still very busy with my family, but after spending every spare minute writing for a couple years, it was wonderful to feel like this project which I had shelved for so long was going again.
The bulk of my efforts around this time were writing and learning everything I could about Young Living Essential Oils. I had been introduced to the products after Andys birth by my Doula Martha and was thrilled with the leap our whole family had made towards health when we started using these products. During those years between 1996 and 2001, Paul and I both went to as many workshops, classes, and conventions as we could fit into our life and spent hundreds of dollars on oils and books etc…to help us get educated about the oils.
It was during this time that I felt prompted by the Lord to organize the Second International Husband/Wife Homebirth Conference. I would feel Heavenly Father prompt me to do it while praying, and every time I felt that pressure, I would say “no, I don’t have the time, money, or energy to organize a conference”. But around that time my Young Living endeavors really started making some money, and I felt like I just did not have any excuses anymore.
So, sometime in 1999, I made the decision to proceed with the conference, and after two years of planning, organizing, and effort, we held the conference in Louisville Colorado in July of 2001.
I hired a web designer to help me set up The Natural Family Co web site and stream the conference video onto the internet. He also put my three books up on the site and I set up a links page to promote My Young Living Essential Oils and My Green businesses.
My maternal grandmother and my mom worked an environmentally concious business in the 70’s after my grandmother healed herself from Rheumatoid Arthritis using nutrition.
I watched her regenerate her body from a sickly wheelchair bound arthritic to a vibrant, go getter filled with life and vitality when I was seven years old. Whenever we went to her house, she would whip up protein shakes, juice carrots, and pop vitamin C into our mouths as her way of saying she loved us. The last five years of her life were spent traveling around the country telling everyone she could about These Products and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and she reached the level of coordinator in the company before her death in 1980.
Her example and passion remains with me to this day, and I am so grateful for her legacy of proactive effort to make herself well. Her arthritis developed after 25 years of cortisone and candy bars for breakfast and lunch, seven babies, and dozens of grandchildren and the doctors gave her six months to live.
She decided that she had nothing to lose and so she went to the local health food store, picked up a copy of There is a cure for arthritis and provided for herself and her extended family five additional good years of life. For me, watching her for those five vital years of my life from age 7 to 12 had a profound impact on me and how I view nutrition.
My Dad with Jeff and Andy
My mother also regenerated her body during those same five years, and although she thought she was finished with childbearing, conceived her last child the year my grandmother became ill again (She died from an aneurysm in her arm). My mom had an energetic pregnancy, a fast natural birth, and breastfed my little sister. The five years before Emily was conceived she had done dance aerobics and really changed our families eating habits, and I believe the product of all of this effort was an amazingly healthy 8th child and little sister for all of us older children to love and care for.
Needless to say, watching the two most important women in my life take personal responsibility for their lives and health was one of the most empowering things that has ever happened to me and it set up a pattern of behavior that moved my mind out of victimization into proactive living when I lost my own health in 1989.
My parents with our four oldest children in 2000
I consider it an honor to continue the environmentally proactive tradition with my family. I use Instant Protein and the multi vitamins all the time, and love the water purification and environmentally safe laundry and dish soaps. This company was green before the concept of green was popular.
Often unmentioned in my efforts around Unassisted Childbirth is the fact that birthing alone at home is extremely eco-friendly. I have a box of cloth diapers that I have used for my last four babes during the newborn time from birth to about three months of age. I have also shared these same diapers with several friends and my sister when they had new babes. Each diaper used over and over and over again saves the landfill from that waste.
Everything in the hospital is disposible. They throw away mounds and piles of refuse from the births of children.
And the way that plastic diapers, disposible pads for the mother, and infant formula are pushed on new moms just make the whole hospital experience a big fat waste of energy and resources.
All of the electricity for the monitors, drugs machines, and NICU aparatus just add layer upon layer of environmental shock to the situation, and for what?
If it is true that over 90% of mothers could safely give birth at home with no problems whatsoever, does this impact on our environment really make any sense at all?
I believe all mothers and fathers should be educated in the economics of natural family living and the hospital should be reserved for those women who are high risk and truly need all the bells and whistles of hospital birth. (I will qualify that statement by saying that I believe all mothers should be supported in choosing the scenarios and health care providers who fit for them at any given birth, and that as we move from 99% of births taking place in the hospital to 90% of births taking place at home, understand and accept a transition period will be inevitable.)
For my last four births I used the same cloth menstrual pads over and over again for after birth bleeding, and the few periods I had. (I have had from 8 months to 15 months of lactational amenorrhea with each child I breastfed).
In 2005 I started writing this blog to take my outreach on the internet to a new and deeper level, and have been amazed at the traffic that has quickly been generated from all over the world.
As for the future? Well, I plan to continue these efforts for the long haul. At times of overwhelm with family life I have been tempted to just pull everything off the web, shut down my business, and move on with my own goals and dreams for the golden years of our life.
But the current worldwide trends towards more technology, more interventions, and more deadly impacts on mothers and children, compel me to stick with this work and keep yet another voice loudly proclaiming the joy of Natural Family Living to anyone interested.
The beauty of the web is that I can take weeks or even months off to focus on home duties and projects, and these two sites will continue to share my message of healing and empowerment.
All of my work, as always, is lovingly dedicated to the babies who will be born in the days, weeks, years, and decades to come.
Jenny Hatch
Natural Family Blog 