Reflections: One Year Ago

Today is an exciting day for BWI of North Central Illinois!

It's our one year anniversary of being an official BWI Chapter!

It's been one heck of a year!  Filled with the excitement of organizing a new chapter, building a lending library, a huge membership drive the first month, walking in a parade, decorating a babywearing scarecrow, putting together raffles and giveaways, having an extremely successful International Babywearing Week, adding meeting locations, dealing with meeting cancellations because of the extremely cold weather, putting together yet another membership drive, an educational wrapping workshop, training new educators, working expos, making demo dolls and much much more!

Looking back, it's been a year full of wonderful memories!   I can't thank the leadership team enough!  With Rachel, Christi, Melissa and Jacquelyn by my side, it has been a lot of work, but so much fun!  From Rachel cutting up dolls, to me always taking selfies with them, having wine and cake to celebrate successes, to Christi picking us out hats for IBW.. I have enjoyed every minute and cherish the camaraderie we share.  We took our passion and put our heart and soul into building this chapter up.  It truly is an amazing thing for us to see it grow.

Thank you Sarah, Missy, and Justine for all the hard work you all have put into the ever growing chapter!  Whether it's donating your time to build a scarecrow, work an expo, teach at 4 meetings per month, etc...you all have shown that you are all extremely dedicated and passionate to spreading the knowledge and love of babywearing.  Thank you to our new VBEs,  Ali, Jennifer, Katy and Susan for joining the team, and dedicating your time to help caregivers learn the benefits of babywearing.  Thank you Katy and Rashada, as our new chapter librarians, we appreciate you volunteering and helping to keep the libraries running smoothly. 

If there was one word to describe this year...I would say it was Teamwork!

And thank you, to all of you for coming to the meetings, telling your friends and family about us, and spreading the love of babywearing!

We begin our second year as a chapter with almost 600 FB members, 12 very active VBEs, 7 monthly meeting locations, 3 fully stocked lending libraries, quarterly member workshops, a list of member benefits, regular BW 101s throughout the community and 95 BWI of NCIL memberships!

What does the next year have in store?  I'm sure more than we can even imagine right now!  But we plan to continue to grow our library, continue our outreach efforts, add some play dates, have some fundraisers, train more educators, and hope to serve the communities we are in as best as possible!

Here's to another great year!