Jessica Lewis
For The New Era
With five young children, two cats, two dogs, five guinea pigs and a goldfish, Jody Garber has her work cut out for her.
As if that weren’t enough, she is also a blogger who wrote an exclusive article on the birth of a celebrity baby for a site that attracts hundreds of thousands of visits, and she has a possible book about pregnancy in the works.
In 2003, Garber started visiting pregnancy forums, offering advice to pregnant and possibly pregnant teenage girls. Tina Yantz, creator of one of the forums Garber frequented, asked Garber to become a moderator, then an administrator, and then, not too long after that, told Garber she was creating a new site.
“She said she liked my style of writing and wanted to know if I would be interested in writing articles for her for these sites. I was very excited. That’s where it all began.”
Garber has been writing for the sites for five years, minus a couple of brief breaks due to her last two pregnancies, which caused her to feel sick all day long, she said.
Before writing for the pregnancy sites, Garber said she had no previous professional writing experience, having simply written some poetry and journal entries as a teenager.
“I wanted to help pregnant women,” she said.
She briefly volunteered at the Lebanon Pregnancy Crisis Center and underwent the training required to help there, but she had to leave when she became pregnant herself, she said.
Garber currently writes most of the content for PregnancyLounge.com and Pregnancy-Baby.com. She also writes the blog for SureBaby.com, which, according to an e-mail she received from Yantz, has a base of 300,000 visitors monthly and is growing.
Her blog entries focus on pregnancy, babies, parenting, women’s health, children’s health and family-related topics.
In April, she conducted her first celebrity interview with the husband of actress Jodie Sweetin, who is best known for her role as Stephanie Tanner, the middle sister on the popular late 1980s/early ’90s TV show “Full House.”
Garber said she had never tried to contact a celebrity directly before, but she decided to contact Sweetin’s husband, Cody Herpin, via MySpace.
“I wanted to try and get exclusive info that nobody else had yet. I really didn’t think I’d hear back,” she said.
“I was beyond shocked when he got back to me, the very same day – the very day after their daughter was born – and was interested in my article.”
Garber said she communicated with Herpin for a few days, collecting information that had not been released anywhere else.
“Nobody had Jodie’s and Cody’s baby’s middle names,” she said. “Cody told me her full name: Zoie Laurel May Herpin. I couldn’t believe it, even before People magazine! People Magazine also was reporting that Jodie had a C-section, but Cody let me know personally that it was actually an emergency C-section. No one else knew this, so that’s what made it an exclusive. I can’t even tell you how excited I have been to have this scoop.”
Within hours of posting the information on the Sure Baby blog, Celebrity Baby Blog posted the same information, crediting Sure Baby as its source.
“This was Sure Baby Blog’s first exclusive, so it’s a pretty big deal to me, as well as my friend (Yantz),” Garber said.
This month, she has the possibility of an exclusive interview with Michele Chopin, who is the wife of Erik, winner of Season 3 of NBC’s Fitness Reality TV show “The Biggest Loser.” Chopin just delivered her third baby, who was her first son.
She also wrote a blog entry about Todd Smith, singer of Christian band Selah, and his wife, Angie, whose fourth daughter died just hours after her birth in April.
“It’s a special thing for me because I lost my first baby,” Garber said of the blog entry.
In addition to her successful on-line writing career, the possibility of a book about pregnancy may be in Garber’s near future, she said.
The book will combine encouraging quotes and scriptures for pregnant women with articles from the Web site, such as a weekly series Garber wrote on the 40 weeks of pregnancy.
“I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, but wouldn’t it be something to be the co-author of a pregnancy book in print that would be available at the local bookstore,” Garber said. “It would literally be a dream come true for me.”
Garber said she writes every night after her children are asleep, which means she has to stay up late and wake up early, but there’s no other way, she said.
“Being a full-time stay-at-home-mom of five small children and having our mini zoo doesn’t allow much time to do anything except taxi kids to and from school, change diapers, take dogs out, chase kids around and clean up constant messes. Therefore, I do the majority of my work late in the evening,” she said.
Garber said her husband Matt, an employee at the Foster Weyerhaeuser veneer mill, helps out by taking their children to the park or to visit family, which gives her more quiet time to write.
Despite her constantly busy schedule, Garber says she loves her children, her pets, and her job, and she feels “so very blessed.”
“Even though things are always chaotic, I wouldn’t change anything.”