Behind the Scenes: A Day in the Life of Katie Ferraro @babyledweanteam

Katie Ferraro (1s):

My house is psycho. I have seven kids, like it's quiet in the morning. I like that. So I get up at four o'clock. The first thing I do is get my tastes, sit down. I do my Instagram post captions for the day. So I do three new pieces of content on Instagram, in the feed every day. So that's what I do from four to five. Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning here on the baby led weaning made easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, feeding you with the competence and knowledge. You need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (42s):

Okay, full disclosure. I didn't really want to do this episode. It is a little out of my comfort zone. This is a behind the scenes look into a day in the life of me. Katie Ferraro feels weird. Your self proclaimed to baby feeding fanatic. Now I didn't want to do it because I would so much rather talk about all of your babies and interview feeding experts about baby led, weaning that you want to hear from and answer your questions. But Lauren who works with us suggested this topic. It's actually my birthday weekend when this is coming out and I'm turning 43 and I had to do like add to get the calculator out and do the calendar year, minus my birth year to actually figure out how old I am. I'm that old, but I'm turning 43.

Katie Ferraro (1m 23s):

And Lauren was like, you should do something about yourself for your birthday, whatever. Okay. So I'm going to give it a shot. At first. I was like, this is not going to be interesting. And then I thought, well, I personally really do like hearing other people's stories, their backstory. I love schedules. I know you guys love schedules. You love baby feeding schedules, which is why I always do them. But I love especially to hear the stories of like the brands and the businesses and the companies that I work with or that I support it through my business or through purchases that I do on behalf of my family actually did a whole series of female founders of feeding companies here on the podcast. And those did really well. So I'm thinking that you guys might like hearing other people's stories. And if that's the case, then let's do this.

Katie Ferraro (2m 4s):

I'm going to give you guys a behind the scenes, look at a day in the life of Katie Ferraro. And if you don't like it, there are 162 other podcast episodes all linked up for you at blwpodcast.com that you can listen to. Just kidding. Let's do this. All right. If we're just meeting for the first time, I'm Katie Ferraro, I'm a registered dietitian, a mom of seven. I specialize in baby led weaning, but seven years ago I had a totally different life. I had recently gotten married, a had had my first baby and she was about four and a half or five months old. And I was a registered dietitian. I still am. But I worked like at the other end of the life spectrum in lifecycle, I was working with elderly nutrition. So geriatric nutrition, long-term care, nursing homes, adult day, home health tube, feeding pumps set up like basically, if you were old and needed a dietitian, I was your gal.

Katie Ferraro (2m 49s):

And I didn't know anything about babies. And I had one, and was already, I don't know, four and a half or five months. And my pediatrician was like, you should start solid foods. And I was like, okay. I also taught college and still do at seven different colleges and universities. And I remember, I like, it feels early. Like I thought it was six months from my nutrition throughout the life cycle curriculum. But I don't know, maybe this guy's right. Started solid foods with my baby struggled. Like she hated me. Like I already struggled a ton with breastfeeding and I had to pump exclusively for her. And I was like, oh, food's going to be easy. Cause I eat food. I can figure this out. Except I started solid foods with purees. Iron-fortified rice cereal will way too early. She hated being fed. This is our daughter, Molly. She hated, I thought she hated me. I got to the point where I was like to my husband, like you feed her fine.

Katie Ferraro (3m 31s):

I've been doing this for four and a half months with breastmilk like you figured out what the food, very frustrating. I was like, what sort of mom can't feed her baby. And then what sort of dietitian mom on top of that, I felt like an abject failure because Molly hated eating and mealtimes turned into this downright battleground. And at the height of all of this feeding frustration, my husband and I found out that we were pregnant with quadruplets. Now we had been doing fertility. We did IVF with Molly. The quadruplets is like a long story. I'll do a different episode on that for the fertility. Fans did not plan on getting pregnant with quadruplets. Don't recommend it actually. But at the time I remember when I saw the first ultrasound with the four embryos on it and I was like, there's two ovaries in two babies.

Katie Ferraro (4m 12s):

And she's like, no, those are for babies. And the first thing I thought about was how am I going to feed four babies at one time when I can't even feed the one baby that I have at home right now? So the second I found out I was pregnant with quads and that we had made the decision not to reduce down to two as they recommend that you do. If you're pregnant with triplets or quads. In many cases, I was preparing myself for a life with at least two severely handicapped children, because the only statistic that I could remember, I'm not a numbers person. Was that 50% of quadruplet pregnancies result in severe handicap. So I was like, okay, if there's four babies in at least half of them are going to be severely handicapped. I probably can't do this consulting nutrition business that I'm running and running around, working 60 hours a week and being gone all the time, I have to change everything.

Katie Ferraro (4m 54s):

So I basically shut down almost the entirety of my consulting business at that time to basically sit on my butt and not have babies prematurely, I did end up going 34 weeks with the quads, which was a miracle because the average gestational period for quadruplets is 28 weeks. That's why there's such a high risk for handicap is because of the early labor. So anything you can do to keep them in there for longer. And I am five foot, 10 inches tall, which really definitely helped because your uterus can stretch a lot further with four babies. I do have a good friend. Who's five foot tall who had quadruplets though. So it can be done. She also went 34 weeks. So 34 weeks, they were in the NICU. They were all born between two and three pounds. We had three boys and one girl, Charlie, Claire, Henry, Dylan. And at the time though, Molly was at home, she was still a baby.

Katie Ferraro (5m 35s):

How old was she at this point? Still terrible eating is all. I remember it. I remember like stressing out and friends would come visit us in the NICU. And the quadruplet babies were all on feeding tubes. And I was like, God, I'm going to mess this one up too. Like, I can't make enough breast milk for them. And the baby at home can't eat. And like, again, I'm stressing out about feeding. And I remember a friend of mine came to visit in the NICU and she was like, okay, what are you doing at home? Like, I can't help you with the babies, but like, how's it going with Molly? And I was telling her, I hate spoonfeeding. And she hates me and I make Charlie do it. My husband she's like, have you heard of baby led weaning? And I was like, I don't know what that is. Like, I don't have time for these hippy parenting things that you love. She's like, no, no, no, no. And she explained that it's when your baby turns six months of age. And I was like, oh, I did that wrong. You start letting the baby feed themselves food. I'm like, oh, I did that wrong. You don't have to do cereals.

Katie Ferraro (6m 16s):

Oh, I did that wrong. They can eat real food. Like I don't believe this. So anyway, I was like, sure, whatever. But I actually started spending all of my time at the NICU when I wasn't you hold babies a lot. If you guys have had babies in the NICU, there's like not a lot to do, but like holding them and skin to skin is important. So I did a lot of research on baby led weaning, and I happened to be an assistant clinical professor at UC San Francisco. And so I could kind of lean on my colleagues there in research to learn more about baby led weaning. And I found out, wow, there is this like real, incredible body of research that supports a baby led approach to feeding as a viable and safe alternative to traditional spoonfeeding. So I was like all in about this baby led weaning thing. And when the quads turned six months adjusted age, we did baby led weaning. And so I didn't know what I was doing at first.

Katie Ferraro (6m 57s):

And I read every book in the world. I read Gill Rapley's book. And I was like, this just kind of go with the flow. We basically figured it out. But I remember being so frustrated that there was so much information about what BLW was and why it's a good idea, but not a lot of practical information on how you do it and how you do it safely. And that information that was out there, it was not coming from feeding experts or credentialed individuals. So I kind of figured it out as a dietitian and a mom. And we had already had a relatively sizeable social media following because of the quadruplets we had worked, we'd done a documentary about the quadruplet pregnancy. And so I remember as my family Instagram account, which I did a ton of baby led weaning stuff on it, not on purpose. It was just like, you know, in stories like here's the baby's eating sardines and people will be like, babies can eat sardines.

Katie Ferraro (7m 38s):

And like, well, they're clearly eating sardines here and there's four of them. But so as we were approaching the hundred thousand follower mark on my family account, I was like, oh, what should we do to celebrate? And this was like before everyone got a hundred balloons and I was like, gosh, you know, the baby's like the thing that people really seem to be gravitating towards is the baby's feeding themselves. And it's been really this transformational experience for me as a mom and for our family. And I'm a dietician I'm like, I'm loving this. Like I want to shift the whole focus of my career to baby led weaning to help other families alleviate the stress associated with spoonfeeding and learn how to safely help their babies transition to solid foods, eating real food. So as we're approaching the a hundred K mark, I was talking to my marketing girl at the time and I had a very, very, just kind of tiptoed into the world of baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (8m 20s):

And I had one gal working for me and we were like, Hey, let's count the baby's foods. And I realized they'd eaten more than a hundred foods before the time they turned one. And so we kind of celebrated that by publishing the first version of the hundred first foods list when we hit a hundred foods, which was about when the quads were all 11 months adjusted age, they were technically, I think it was right around their first birthday anyway, kind of fast tracked them on the food to get to a hundred. But that kind of set the stage for my foray into formalizing this a hundred first foods approach to baby led weaning because there's research that supports that the greater, the number of foods and flavors you can feed your baby. Then the more likely they are to be independent eaters and not be picky eaters. So that's kind of how I developed the hundred first foods approach and then kind of shifted the entire focus of my nutrition business to baby led weaning specialized.

Katie Ferraro (9m 3s):

In that 18 months after the quads were born, we had another set of multiples. My husband and I have baby twins, Gus and Hannah. By that time, the quads were 18 months old, not babies kind of out of the baby phase. And I was doing baby led weaning for work, but it felt weird to be sharing. Baby led weaning stuff on my family page. Like people follow our family page. And that's at fortified fam F O U R T I F I E D fam F A M. And that page people like literally they're lawyers. They want to see the quadruplets. They want to see family stuff. They don't want to see other people's babies doing baby led weaning. So when Gus and Hannah started solid foods at six months of age, actually spun off the baby led weaning team Instagram from day one, I called it baby led wean team. Cause I wanted it to be a team-based approach to helping other families do baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (9m 46s):

And it was honestly a way to continue social media and my baby led weaning business, but without spamming, my family followers, baby led weaning stuff. So when Gus and Hannah started solid foods, when they were six months adjusted age, I had really revised the a hundred first foods approach and did it with them the beginning. If you go back to the beginning of my baby led weaning team, Instagram page, it's Gus and Hannah's first hundred foods. I started that from zero. My big account used to be my family account and very quickly doing the a hundred first foods with those babies. And then after Gus and Hannah hit a hundred foods. We had had a pretty significant following of other families who were falling in and then following my program and it kind of took off from there. And so once Gus andS Hannah turned one, the focus of my baby led weaning Instagram and business was not to be about my babies, but rather to be about your babies.

Katie Ferraro (10m 29s):

And we made that transition over the course of 2019. And then of course, pandemic in 2020. And really a lot of my baby led weaning business took off because a lot of my parents were at home. I have a lot of working moms in my community who were like, listen, I got a few months to figure this out. Can you help me? How do I do baby led weaning? What's the a hundred first foods approach all about why does it work? How do you do it? And so on and so forth. So that's kind of like the business history of how I got in to doing baby led weaning full-time I still do teach at a number of colleges and universities. I teach at UC San Francisco. I do all their online nutrition programs for the nurse practitioner program. I do teach at San Diego State in the didactic program for dietetics. I teach cultural foods there. I teach at University of San Diego in their NP program and at UCLA extension I'm in a few other places.

Katie Ferraro (11m 13s):

So I really enjoy teaching and do that all online. I love teaching healthcare professionals about baby led weaning, and then parents about baby led weaning as well. So that's like the business background, my daily routine on how it actually gets done. I like schedules. So I'm going to start at the beginning. And I wake up in the morning at 4:00 AM and I don't want you guys to roll your eyes. And some people are like, dude, I hate morning people don't judge. I know not everyone is a morning person. And I get that. When I get to the end of my day, you're going to be like this lady, such a loser. She can't even stay up past eight o'clock maybe she shouldn't get up so early, but I start my day early for two reasons. So after college I was a peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. Ironically, I was a reproductive health volunteer teaching about the health benefits of small family sizes. And now I have seven.

Katie Ferraro (11m 53s):

So total hypocrite, but totally transformative experience. I absolute fan of the peace Corps. Nepal was life-changing I'm fluent in Nepalese. If there's any Nepalese parents out there. I love when I see the Nepali babies on Instagram, but in Nepal where I lived in the Eastern region, I lived in a district called EELAM. It's the tea growing region. It's adjacent to Darjeeling and there was no electricity. So you wake up when the sun comes up and you go to bed. When the sun goes down and the family that I live with just caught up at sunrise. So, so did I, and it just kinda stuck with me. I don't know why I just became a morning person, but secondly, when I came back from college or when I came back from the peace Corps, rather I was in graduate school at UC Berkeley for a while, I had a private practice in nutrition there. I got homesick and moved home to San Diego from the bay area, actually sold my nutrition business in the bay area.

Katie Ferraro (12m 38s):

When I got home, I was a consultant dietician, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Dude. I was like 25 years old and living at home with my parents. So I was a consultant dietitian at the dis executive health program. And we would like CEOs would fly in from all over the world. And I was a dietician that they talked to you. And I would do like when you do like a 24 hour food recall or tell me what your typical day is like, and then put the food stuff in there. And we try to figure out some areas for improvement. Like almost a hundred percent of these highly successful high net worth individuals woke up within the four o'clock hour. Like not five, o'clock like four o'clock. What are you guys all doing at four they're like, dude, you got to get your headset for the day you got to work out or you got to do like your morning routine, your morning ritual. So I was like, oh, okay. And I had already kind of had tendencies towards being a morning person.

Katie Ferraro (13m 21s):

So my family makes fun of me. I'm the oldest of six kids and we're all a little intense. All my siblings are actually, our parents are both independent business owners and self-employed and have been our whole life and all five of my siblings and myself own our own businesses and work for ourselves. And they're like, Katie, you're the only one that gets up that stupid early. And they make fun of me like, oh four is the new five. And like, she's going to start getting up at three and telling you it's the new four, but I like 4:00 AM. It works for me. My house is psycho. I have seven kids. Like it's quiet in the morning. I like that. So I get up at four o'clock. I drink tea. I've never been a coffee person. I do have a nasty diet Coke habit, which I'm happy to admit. The first thing I do is get my tea, sit down. I do my Instagram post captions for the day. So I do three new pieces of content on Instagram, in the feed every day have forever.

Katie Ferraro (14m 2s):

That just what works for us. I do all of my own Instagram, every business consultant and business coach in the world tells me to give up that part of my business. And I just can't. I, I love you guys. That's how I met most of you here on the podcast. It's important for me as a subject matter expert to be in charge of writing my own content. So that's what I do from four to five. We have a good system with our team for content development, but I'm the one that actually writes everything. I write all my own emails. You guys, I write all my own show notes is probably why I don't get a lot of stuff done, but I love writing. I love content creation. And so I'm very protective of that part of the business. So the reality also is I do spend a lot of time on my phone and on Instagram as part of my business. And I don't want my kids to see me on my phone all the time. I don't want that to be what they remember about me. So I do a lot of it before they get up and after they go to bed and then when they go to school, I do it in my office.

Katie Ferraro (14m 46s):

So someday I think they'll probably figure out how much time I spend on social media for work. My oldest is seven right now. We haven't had to deal with the social media stuff. I don't know how we'll do that. I look to those of you with older kids to give me advice on how to deal with that. But I'm very grateful for the community that I've built on Instagram. However, it does take a lot of time. So,5:15, I leave for the gym. I go to an old lady, bootcamp, gym in my town, which I absolutely love. Like I've never in my life as a 43 year old, I started going there three years ago, said that I like working out. Like, I think it's annoying when people say they like to work out. Cause I think they're lying, but I actually found a workout that works for me. It's the only thing I've been able to stick with. The only thing I've been able to like to see results from, but I like, cause I feel better. Like if I, I look forward to going to the gym usually, cause it means I'm done with my Instagram for the day.

Katie Ferraro (15m 31s):

I miss it. If I can't go, it sets my stage for the whole day. I'm nicer to my kids. If I work out I'm nicer to my husband. If I work out, it's an actual excuse to take a shower and get ready for the day, like I need it for a lot of reasons. So I do a workout class from 5:30 to 6:15. I get home and get my kids by 6:30. So I get my kids up. We have seven kids. And at the time of this recording, our oldest is seven Molly and five of our kids are in school. So the quads are in kindergarten and Molly's in second grade. And then my three-year-old twins, Gus and Hannah are at home. So I want to preface the whole morning routine with the fact that we have an au pair live with us and an au pair. If you're not familiar with the concept is a lovely, younger person who comes from another country on a J1 student visa through a US state department approved program to help you with your kids in exchange for living with your family for a year, with the opportunity to extend for an additional six, nine or 12 months.

Katie Ferraro (16m 17s):

So I realized very on actually like from the day I knew I was pregnant with Gus in Hannah, we are going to have seven kids, age three and under my husband and I cannot do this by ourselves. I totally admire big families who have no outside help. I think that's amazing, but my husband travels full time. He's an aviation executive and I basically had to quit working to prepare for this quadruplet pregnancy. And for what we kept hearing was a 50% chance of major handicap with the quad. So anyway, I was like, we're going to need a third adult. So back to the au pair, I always thought an au pair was like something that fancy people had. It sounds fancy, but I like full-time nanny. Like none of that was compatible with our financial situation, but a good friend of mine who is a single mom of four girls had an au pair like tons of au pairs year after year.

Katie Ferraro (16m 58s):

And she was like, no au pairs are totally affordable. You need to change your mindset. It is life-changing to have the help of another young adult, especially when your kids are a lot of work close in age, they become part of your family. And really all you have to do is really have a private room in your house to host an au pair, not even a private bathroom in our old house, all nine of us in my families shared one bathroom. So the au pair could have her bathroom, but you don't have to do that. We started using the agency. My friend used our first au pair Julia arrived from Germany. When my twins were a month old, she was integral in filming the original hundred first foods content ever since then. I'm totally sold on au pairs to the point that I have all of my seven kids in two bedrooms and probably will forever just so that we can have our third spare bedroom for our au pair.

Katie Ferraro (17m 37s):

So we are on our third au pair right now. We had a 20 month gap during COVID. I know you guys all had childcare situations during COVID. I actually thought I was going to die when my husband was traveling and I was doing all the work and all the kids by myself, but that's life. A lot of people do it by themselves. We've had two Germans and now our new au pair Anouk is from the Netherlands. And I love it because au pairs can work split shift. So oral care helps us for a few hours in the morning. And then she comes back at night and helps with the dinner and the bedtime, which, you know, you can't do that with a nanny, like come for two hours and then go do something else. But then come back later tonight and help me. So the split shift is really key for us, but I mean, it's the cultural exchange. It's everything. They teach our kids, their language, their songs, customs we've meet our au pairs, families.

Katie Ferraro (18m 17s):

the au pairs travel with us. Like I'm planning to go visit all of them in their countries when we can travel again. It's literally like having a new family member one that's halfway between your age and your kids' age. And from a financial standpoint, I'm always happy to talk to the parents about this, but it is definitely the most affordable way to have full-time childcare. And so if you do want to check out, au pairs, I just use the agency. My friend used, we've been very happy with them. They're called cultural care. And I do have an affiliate code to waive the one-time $75 registration fee. So the code is PCKATIE75 at culturalcare.com. It's basically like online dating, which I never did. Cause that was before that era. But you have a profile. They have a profile. You go on, you match with an au pair or you interview a bunch of people.

Katie Ferraro (18m 57s):

Once you match, then they come and basically change your life. So back to the morning when I get home, this is not me doing it all by myself. It's my au pair Anouk and I, we get the kids up. We get them dressed. One of us does breakfast. One of us does lunches by the way, pro tip. I make my kids get dressed before breakfast. Every morning when your kids are in school, do this. They're like highly motivated to eat breakfast. Kids are never motivated to change their own clothes, even though they can, unless they're hungry. So my kids know they want eat breakfast. They better be in their school clothes. My kids do wear uniforms. They actually go to the same Catholic school that I went to with all of my siblings in our town. And we live outside of San Diego for the breakfast thing. My friends always like, but then their uniforms or school clothes get all dirty. I make my school age. Kids wear the preschool sized bapron bibs at breakfast.

Katie Ferraro (19m 40s):

They hate it. Like these are our babies, but they're not it preserves their school clothes. They're bigger. I think my seven year old is probably about like the top size for that preschool size. Like she's about to grow out of it. But if you have bigger kids like kindergarten, first, second graders preschoolers, the Bapron size, preschool size, super awesome. Like I want an adult one for me. They used to have adult ones. I don't think Kelsey makes them anymore. But if you are checking them out, I know a lot of you guys use the bapron bibs for baby led weaning the toddler sizes. The one for babies. It's the preschool size. That's for the bigger kids. I generally put kids in preschool size, starting around age three. I have an affiliate code for bapron baby. It's KATIE10 and that's for 10% off. I love their bibs for baby led weaning, but definitely check out the preschool size one.

Katie Ferraro (20m 20s):

Even though I'm probably traumatizing my kindergarteners by making them more bibs, but whatever their clothes are clean. So 7:15 AM my kids leave for school, either my husband, if he's home or my au pair, I drive them. And I feel bad when I tell my routine because my husband is like very, very limited involvement in it. But like that's by design. He's wonderful. And he's very confident with our kids. It's just, he's not here a lot. And even when he is, it's like, if you're not here all the time, he's like wants to have fun in the morning. Like this is not fun. Like, you know, I'm like yelling at him, like he's another kid. So I also have the au pair because like, we worked really well together. I totally get the whole two moms situation. I definitely see the benefits do it. So we have a sprinter van, a 12 passenger sprinter van love it. I don't like to drive around with any empty seats. I pick up all my friend's kids on the way to school. Like one of my best friends is not a morning person.

Katie Ferraro (21m 1s):

So if I've space left in my van, I always get her kids. So she doesn't have to get up early. If I'm not driving. If Anouk or my husband goes to school, I'll stay at clean the kitchen and get my twins ready for the day. It's just like quiet. I usually listen to like, let them watch something on PBS kids. So I feel like they're learning. And then I listen to podcasts to clean the house or whatever the deal with theau pair sorry, back to that. They can work up to 45 hours each week. So we do like to give our old pairs full weekends off, like we're intense during the week. I want you to go have fun with your friends on the weekend, but my au pair helps us in the weekday mornings. And then after a few hours, she gets off for the whole day. And then she comes back in the afternoon, like bedtime dinner stuff. So I have an aunt who has helped me since the quads were born. She comes at eight and she watches Gustin. Hannah, my twins. They're not in preschool.

Katie Ferraro (21m 41s):

They're my last babies. I want them at home. My aunt is fabulous. She's also as a teacher in Mexico city before she teaches them Spanish, like she's amazing. So by eight o'clock I'm working like my work day starts. I'm very protective about my work time. I know it's a great luxury to be able to work. To be honest, I would actually be crazy if I couldn't work. I love my kids, but I'm really grateful that my aunt comes and helps me. And so we have a house. We live in a town, the town I grew up in and we have a house. Then we have a pool house attached to it or detached. And there's two bedrooms in there. I think like other people would use it for a sauna or gym or something. I use it for my office and my husband has an office and then it has a kitchen. So some of you guys ask me like, what's up with your fake kitchen? So I have a fake kitchen for work.

Katie Ferraro (22m 21s):

That's actually in our pool house. It's like this like super cheesy cocktail bar set up, but I use it for filming all my baby led weaning videos that kitchen's always cleaned. My real life. Kitchen is a mess. We're actually probably going to remodel it for work and video stuff, but I'm working right on my property so I can kind of run in and out if I need to do stuff with the kids. But I pretty much worked from eight till five. And I feel like maybe we'll do a separate episode about the inner workings of the baby led wean team, which kind of runs like clockwork. But we have a day where we do podcasts a day where we do new content one whole day, where all I do is interviews, parent interviews, feeding expert, interviews, me being on other podcasts interviews. I also still teach all my courses. So I have a lot of schoolwork that I need to do with my colleagues at the different universities where I teach.

Katie Ferraro (23m 2s):

So I kind of like am in the zone from eight to five. I don't really even take a lunch break. If you know, if you go back in the house and the kids see you and it's like a disaster. So I just kind of grind it out from eight to five working. I love that I have to don't laugh, but I'm the co-leader of the girl Scouts. Now my friend talked me into it. I'm not very good at things like that. And I'm not creative at all. And I'd actually disliked Pinterest, which that'll shock a lot of moms, but she's like if I plan everything, we just come and be the other warm body in the room so we can have a girl scout troop. So like sometimes I leave early, I have to do girl Scouts stuff where we do sports. To be honest, my kids are very young still. So we don't have to do a lot of activities, which I'm grateful for. I get done right at five. My aunt goes home. My au pair comes back on someone, watches the kids.

Katie Ferraro (23m 42s):

Someone makes dinner. I like to make dinner in my old life. I like to cook. So I do make dinner. We eat together. I get off at five. I try to be eating by 5:30, 6 at the latest done with dinner and getting ready for bed at 6:30. And my kids all go to my twins, go back down. They didn't take a nap. Usually between 6:30 and seven. And my big kids go down at seven and then my au pair and I cleaned the whole house and everybody's done by eight and literally drink like two glasses of wine and pass out on the couch in a perfect world. I would be like, oh, I go back to my pool house. And then I do all the work. I didn't get done that day, but I don't care that much. And I definitely can't focus at night and I'm not an evening person. So one thing we started doing at our team meetings for work with Lauren, the great Lauren who is the mastermind behind everything.

Katie Ferraro (24m 25s):

She makes us do a win and a stuck. So everyone has to go around and say, oh, when something good, that happened in something that they're stuck on. So at the end of this episode, I just want to share with you guys my when and my stuck, I'll start with my stuck. I'm not good at thinking about what we're going to have for dinner, which sounds really hypocritical. Cause all I talk about and maybe like, meaning is like, it's so important to food prep. And like I have to make a lot of baby led weaning food, but sometimes the kids are like, oh, we're having fritters again. Like awesome. I wish I was more prepared like people that have a menu for the whole week or like my goals, but I know I'm just not wired that way. I'm one day at a time. So I always get stuck about what we're going to have for dinner. I feel like we eat the same 10 things, but like they're not that creative or that inventive. And I wish I would put more time in my schedule to prepare food, but like I get done at five and I want dinner ready at 5:30.

Katie Ferraro (25m 8s):

And that sometimes is just, it's a fool's errand. Like it's not going to happen. Or like the quality of a dinner that I want to make is not there. So I don't know a way to improve that. But that's something that I'm stuck on, especially where my kids like I'm starving. I'm starving at night. We don't eat snacks. I've shared that a lot on the podcast. And like, I need to have dinner ready by 5:30, because if not, then they like literally start freaking out because they're so hungry. And then they start fighting snacks, which I can't have. Cause then they don't eat my dinner. So I got to figure out a situation. If you guys have any tips for how to make a lot of food magically appear for your kids at 5:30, when you have to work till five, I'd love to know. So that's my stuck. It's the food prep thing for dinner. And I don't have the energy to do on the weekends. My win is that during pandemic, I allowed myself to admit that I hate going to the grocery store.

Katie Ferraro (25m 53s):

I used to like it when it was just me and I only to cook for meat. And if I found something expensive, it didn't matter. It was just me. Or if I didn't want to make dinner, it didn't matter. It was just me. I don't like grocery stores shopping. It doesn't spark joy. So I really leaned into home delivered groceries. And I would argue people like when it's expensive and there's a markup, I'm a Instacart fan just because that's, what's in my area. And I also do ButcherBox for me. And I've often on done some produce delivery stuff. I haven't found one that really works for me. I do have a sick butcher box deal for you guys though. But whatever the ButcherBox deal of the month is somehow my ButcherBox link gives you an extra $10 off your first butcher box. So if you guys have been thinking about getting home delivered meat delivered to your doorstep, there's no code. It's like a link you have to go to, but to get the deal, like if it's ground beef for life or free Turkey or whatever it is, plus an extra $10 off.

Katie Ferraro (26m 36s):

So if you go to BLW podcast.com/ 163 ButcherBox has been awesome because that's where all my meat comes from. Instacart is where my groceries come from. And then I haven't committed to a fruit and vegetable produce box yet. I like the idea, but like sometimes the quality varies. Sometimes it's not affordable, et cetera. But the outsourcing groceries thing I would argue and I go back and forth with my sister, my sister likes going to like five different grocery stores a day. She has six kids and she actually like loves cooking and makes fabulous food. So sometimes I like finagle and invite to her house. At least once a week, I bring all the wine. She makes all the food. We have 13 kids between us. Like it works out, but she hates Instacart and the grocery things, cause she's like, they've marked the price up. Like I know that that watermelon should only be $2 and you paid $2 and 25 cents for it. I'm like, yeah, but if I go to Costco, I'm just going to buy other stuff that wasn't on the list.

Katie Ferraro (27m 18s):

So I feel like the grocery home delivery prevents me from impulse buying. So that's how I justify it. So that's been a win for me cause I feel like I bought back a lot of hours. And if yours are on Instacart, when you finish, they tell you like how many hours you've saved. Like I think they made that counter just for me. Cause I'm like, dude, I've saved so many hours by not going to the grocery store. So that's my regular week weekends. I just do kid stuff. I'm not on my phone on weekends. I mean, I wish I could be sometimes, but like I actually physically can't. I do try to make kids not see me on my phone. I don't want them to know what social media is, especially not yet. I think social media is a fabulous place to have a relatively large Instagram following across both of my channels. And there's nobody mean or trolley in my community because I feel like I set the tone. I mean, sometimes I have to block people who are crazy, but like as far as like it being a terrible, horrible, vast wasteland, I think Instagram is a fabulous place to meet other people, to share ideas, especially the visual of babies eating to share.

Katie Ferraro (28m 10s):

I mean, I share the fun. I share the harder sides of life to it. And to be honest, most people just want to see a bunch of little kids running around. So my family account is out there. If you guys want to check it out, it's pure chaos. The baby led weaning account is there if you need help on how to feed your baby. So I kind of check out Saturday and Sunday, my kids are in kindergarten and we go to Catholic school. And my mom's rule always was when you go to kindergarten and Catholic school, you have to go to mass. So now we have to take five kids to mass on Sundays. So I usually have to do like a social event after that with the MOSIS to recover. But I hang out on Sundays and do a lot of family stuff. We do a lot of family dinners. Five of my six siblings are here in San Diego. There's 20 grandkids around all of us. My parents both still work. Full-time it's the downside of being self-employed your whole life, but you don't always get to have a nice retirement.

Katie Ferraro (28m 50s):

They love working there around, we see them a lot. So we spend a lot of time with cousins and friends and I had to, I don't answer your emails or respond to your DMs or comment or post anything new on the weekends. Cause I'm off my phone. And then every Monday there's a new podcast episode. Every Thursday, there's a new podcast episode. So this was kind of fun. Now that I did it. I don't want to do it all the time. I want to go back to talking about you guys, but thanks for letting me share my behind the scenes a day in the life of Katie Ferraro at baby led mean team. I think I'll do another one on like the back end of the business. We've had a lot of changes recently just hired first full-time employee, which is very scary, but very fabulous. We've got a team of like eight people now, everyone else part-time some moms, some not moms. It's really kind of been fun and definitely growing.

Katie Ferraro (29m 31s):

I do have a parting piece of advice and this is not related to business, but I was thinking about it when I was at the gym this morning, when I was thinking about this episode, I'm like, what am I gonna talk about? Clearly I found something to talk about. But one thing that's been really different for me since my kids started school versus when I had seven kids three and under at home is that when we were talking about this on the Instagram, the other day with some of you guys, but I felt like I didn't have any mom, friends. I didn't even have room for mom, friends when my babies were babies, like I didn't do mommy and me groups or that sort of stuff. Cause it was, it was always working. And then during pandemic, you couldn't do that stuff. So I know a lot of you guys feel very isolated with your babies. They're like, gosh, I don't have a community. And that's why I do try to foster a sense of community on baby led wean team, especially through Instagram and hear through the podcast so that you know that you're not alone if, certainly in parenting, but in the way you've decided to start solid foods with your baby.

Katie Ferraro (30m 16s):

But when your kids go to school, it becomes so much easier to make friends. Like I'd always heard that. And I was like, no, whatever. You just don't make friends when you're an adult. And now I like looked at the past years since my kids have been in school. I'm like, wait a minute. I actually have new friends. So I just want to remind you that all this work at home with the baby where you feel like you're going crazy and maybe you're not using your brain. And I know a lot of moms that are like, I went to college and now I'm at home like changing diapers. Like, listen, you will get to use the other side of your brain and your life and your being. When your kids go to school, I think it gets a lot easier. I know there's a whole new bag of worms with each stage and each phase and people always say, what's your favorite phase? People always say, do you want more babies? I'm like, heck no, I got all your guys' babies to work with and watch like, I'm very good and very done.

Katie Ferraro (30m 59s):

But I do love the phase when kids are in school because you do meet new friends and not just because your kids are the same age, like I've really met new friends because just exposure to new people. So, you know, having an online business and being at home all day, working by yourself or with a remote virtual team can feel really isolating. But I do feel really grateful for having had the opportunity to make new friends. And I want you guys to know that if you don't have school aged kids yet that when you do it becomes a lot easier to make friends. So that's my parting piece of advice. Thanks so much for listening. This was super fun. I'll see you guys next time where we'll be talking about somebody else by now.