Yesterday Missoulian business reporter Betsy Cohen forwarded an e-mail noting that the founder of a natural cloth diaper business had been named Montana Small Business Person of the Year.

The Small Business Administration picked Bozeman’s Kim Ormsby, chief executive officer of the Natural Baby Company, in recognition of her ability to capitalize on the growing eco-friendly baby products market and expand her small online retail store into “a multi-million dollar brand with retailers in over 20 countries.”

The e-mail says that in just two years, the company grew by 250 percent and expanded its retailed base by 1,000 percent in 2009 alone – spurred on in large part by the growing demand for economical and natural alternatives to disposal diapers.

According to the note:

•    The average child uses about 6,000 disposable diapers in two years.

•    At 25 cents a diaper this can add up to between $1,600 and $2,000.

VS.

•    The average Gro Baby (a brand of cloth diaper sold by the Natural Baby Company) uses 24 cloth shells and 24 soaker pads in 2 years

•    The average Gro Baby parent spends around $455 in 2 years, or just $20 a month on diapers

•    Using Gro Baby diapers instead of disposables can save parents over $1,000 in 2 years!

•    There are currently about 9.5 million children under 2 and in diapers, 7.5% of those babies are in cloth diapers and 92.5% in disposable diapers. If families using disposables switched cloth diapers they would save over $6 billion total.

Ormsby will be going to Washington, D.C. in May to accept her award, along with the winners from other states, at the SBA’s annual National Small Business Week event. 

“I am extremely honored to be named the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2010 Montana Small Business Person of the Year,” Ormsby said in a prepared statement. “What’s most thrilling is that amongst the financial and corporate companies that are making great contributions to our economy, the SBA is honoring a product line in such a niche, but essential category and is highlighting the position our industry holds as a significant part of this nations success.”

Congratulations to Kim Ormsby, Montana’s top “mompreneur”!

- MM

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One of the Missoulian’s regular columnists, George Will, writes a nationally syndicated column that comes out twice a week. Since the Missoulian only runs his missives on Tuesdays, the second column usually goes unpublished.

Lo and behold, this week’s “extra” column is about parents and educators who try to build up children’s self-esteem by giving them constant praise and removing any barriers to achievement.

Here’s my confession: I think my daughter is the bees knees and often tell her so. I don’t know if that has encouraged her to become a self-motivator of if she’s just naturally that way, but she is definitely the kind of kid who challenges herself and isn’t disuaded by failure.

So there, George Will.

Now, here’s his column:

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While reorganizing a bedside table drawer, I unearthed the miniature book of poetry that my mother had scripted in the 1930s during her youthful girlhood.

These secret compositions she had, for 60 years, sheltered inside a shoebox at the top of her closet. Holding the sonnets, the scribblings of her soul, for the first time in the 11 years since her passing, I stumbled upon the chance to revisit her meanderings. This time, I really read her thoughts, now that the ache of her absence had somewhat softened.

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Now’s the time to register for the 2010 Parent Expo, which will take place from 5:15 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Jan. 29.

Families First is organizing this year’s expo with the slogan “Making good parents GREAT,” and the Lifelong Learning Center and MISMO Gymnastics and Cheer are co-sponoring the event. The expo will take place at MISMO, which is located at 1900 West Broadway.

The schedule kicks off with an introduction by educator John Sommers-Flanagan, then breaks into workshops on topics like “From Mild to Wild and Back Again: Parenting Your Preschooler,” “Bullies: Targets and Bystanders,” and “Great To Greater: 7 (or so) Favorite Parenting Tips To Add To Your Repertoire.”

What parent couldn’t use a few more tips to add to her repertoire? Register by calling 549-8765 or go to the Lifelong Learning Center Web site. The cost, which includes dinner, is $25 per person or $40 for couples, and child care is available for an additional cost.

- MM

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With Christmas only a few days away, I’ve noticed that the World Wide Web is again filling with admonishments to parents to “stop lying to your children” about Santa Claus as well as pleas to parents not to crush their belief in the jolly old elf too soon.

I don’t remember ever “teaching” my daughter about Santa Claus. She’s gotten a present from him every Christmas of her 5-year-old life, but always after a deluge of gifts from family and friends, so I doubt she registered anything about Santa from that.

This year, however, she somehow arrived at the conclusion that we must leave cookies for Santa to eat on Christmas Eve. I’m thinking she got that from one of her favorite Christmas books – along with all her other notions about Saint Nick.

Then, this past weekend Santa showed up at one of her best friend’s birthday parties, and my shy little girl mustered up the courage to approach him for a candy cane. The next day, another one of her little friends told her that wasn’t the “real” Santa, but “a dad dressed up like Santa.”

I never really planned on teaching my little girl about Santa. I’m not planning on telling her he isn’t real, either. I have a feeling that she won’t even ask – and my daughter asks questions about EVERYTHING.

Why? Because in our house, what with all the friends and neighbors and family, and the decorating and cookie-making and playing in the snow, and Christmas specials on TV and special books I refuse to read in July, and making cards and choosing presents and wrapping them up and dropping them off, Santa ends up just sort of receding into the background. The jolly red bringer of gifts ends up not being such a central part of Christmas – and that is a lesson I do want my daughter to learn.

- MM

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Word just came in that Montana was recently voted the fourth-strictest state in the nation. That’s according to the highly unscientific poll available at CMT’s World’s Strictest Parents Online Parenting Survival Guide.

The poll placed Montana squarely among the nearly half of U.S. states in which parents are “ridiculously rigid.” Our neighbors in Idaho and South Dakota, on the other hand, are among the “biggest push-over” states, while neighboring states Wyoming and North Dakota were deemed “average joe’s.”

They based this ranking, apparently, on such indicators as whether Montana parents view family dinners as an expression of love, and how we would deal with a child’s surprise body-piercing.

Too bad they didn’t take in account the age at which many parents in Montana let children drive four-wheelers and shoot guns. That might have changed the results a little, don’t you think?

What say you, Montanans? Are we really that strict?

- MM

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This afternoon a relative sent me an e-mail, pretty much out of the blue, asking if I, being in the news business and all, had any idea who would be getting permanent custody of Michael Jackson’s three kids.

For the record, I have no bloomin’ idea.

But I do understand what motivates my relative to ask. She’s got three kids of her own, and I’m sure she has that same question lurking in the back of her head that every parent should – but doesn’t want – to answer: What would happen to your kids if you died?

This is purely a rhetorical exercise, of course. Still, it’s an important one, and one I haven’t yet figured out how to navigate yet. Just how do parents settle the issue of whom gets custody of their children if both of the adults are no longer able to care for them?

I notice that a lot of people automatically turn to the grandparents. But if so, whose – the mom’s or the dad’s? My daughter is close to both her grandmas. How could we decide? And they are both, well, older.

So who? Our friends and neighbors? I would have to wish them good luck wrestling our daughter from the grasp of the grandmas.

I realize this is an incredibly personal decision that each family must arrive at on its own. Which is probably why you see so few articles tackling it. If anyone knows of any good resources on this, send them on to me, would you?

- MM

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Every parent probably has her own view of how her kids should dress, but until I had a child of my own I never realized just how early the fashion battles can begin.

It turns out they can start in your head pretty much the moment your child is born.

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The last time I had to look for day-care for my daughter was more than two years ago, but still I shudder to remember some of the outfits I checked out before we found her current provider. Some places were just too “institutional,” some were homey but filthy, and some of the employees (and in particular some employees who looked young enough to need looking after themselves) were too inattentive for my taste. If I could have rated the worst of these places, they would have gotten minus points.

And if I could rate the day care where my daughter is playing as I write this, it would be off the charts.

It is such a struggle to find a day care program and people you can feel comfortable leaving your kids with. They spend so much time there, every day, that you want the people your child spends all that time with to reinforce your own parenting style – but that’s a luxury for parents who are scrambling to find an empty slot anywhere so they can keep their jobs.

Thus I have high hopes for this new state system. Missoulian State Bureau reporter Jennifer McKee writes that next year Montana will launch a voluntary program, called STARS to Quality, that would rate child care programs and make that information available to the public. And it would help enrolled programs get more money to continue their stellar work, and even make some improvements.

“The economics of early childhood programs has long been a problem,” McKee writes. “Despite the costs – early childhood programs for two children in most Montana communities easily top $1,100 a month – teachers and caregivers typically earn low wages and owners often struggle to break even.”

If I were to nit-pick a good thing, though, it would be the fact that the evaluation will be done by trained state professionals – which certainly makes sense. However, I would also love to see parents’ opinions taken into account in some way as well. They’re the ones with first-hand (OK, second-hand; their kids have first-hand) experience with these programs day in and day out.

That said, I expect this rating system will come to play a huge role in Montana parents’ child care decisions.

- MM

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In an e-mail back-and-forth with another mom here in Missoula, we both confessed to being a bit neurotic at times. Especially times when everywhere you turn, there’s new scary information about the swine flu, the regular flu, and boys supposedly drifting away in balloons only to turn up in their parents’ garage only to be investigated as part of what looks like a hoax orchestrated by his family.

Is it any wonder moms get a little over-anxious at times and can’t stop themselves from speed-dialing their pediatricians?

I confess, I rate myself an 8 on the mom-xiety meter, 1 being the parent who just doesn’t care and 10 being the mom who requires therapeutic intervention. An example: While I’m not so anxious as to ban my child from trick-or-treating on Halloween, I know I will throw out about half the candy she brings home just because it gives me a suspicious feeling. It doesn’t have to have a broken seal or any other tell-tale sign of tampering; if it so much as looks at me funny it’s gone.

How about you? What keeps you up at night? Or if you sleep soundly, how do you achieve that zen in such a chaotic, child-endangering world?

- MM

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