Milkshakes and Margaritas — a blog for the modern mom

The Lovely Ladies of Glug

Kristen Pena and her husband Luis started the Glug Collection of clothing after their daughter Sadie was born, seeing it as an opportunity to channel their creative energy into something that would allow them to spend more time with her. The two, who both worked in advertising, started out selling their eclectic designs at a few boutiques around town and they are now sold around the world and have been pictured on celebrity babies in magazines. As the business (and her family) grew, Kristen invited her friend, Meredith Ashworth, to join the company. The women, who each have two young children, work side-by-side and help each other juggle the demands of work and parenting.

Read on to hear how they got started, what inspires them and where the name "Glug" came from.

Admiring San Fran Artist Georgianne Fastia

I have been admiring Georgianne Fastia's work from afar for some time now. She holds a studio space where my husband used to paint, and I've always been drawn to her paintings. There is a sweet but eerie quality to each work that I find captivating. 

Read on to read what inspires her and how she got her start.

Lori Carsillo: Mom, Jazz Lounge Singer & Slumber Songstress

Lori Carsillo is an incredibly talented local jazz singer, and has recently released a new lullaby cd called “Lullabies for Little Dreamers”. Her voice is sultry and melodic, and the sweet songs are a joy to listen to for both you and your baby. We grabbed Lori and asked her a few questions about her music and what inspires her. 

Read on to find out more and for a chance to win a copy of her album.

Good Night Gorilla

San Francisco Zoo Gorilla Keeper Kathy Edwards was pregnant at the same time as one of the zoo's gorillas. The two even took the same prenatal vitamins. But when the gorilla rejected her baby, Kathy and her colleagues had to take over mom duties. Even without Dr. Sears as a guide, gorillas practice attachment parenting to the extreme and that meant that Kathy was holding a baby gorilla all day and going home to her infant at night. The back and forth was confusing and she sometimes forgot that her son Lukas could not do the same things that the rapidly developing gorilla baby could. 

Zoo photos by Eva Thoresen

Read on to learn what it is like to be a "mom" to a gorilla and a human at the same time!

The Sweet Side of Allison Krongard, Founder of WallCandy Arts

When Allison Krongard started WallCandy Arts, she was making sales calls and shipping the product from her living room. After two years, that became "total insanity" and she outsourced the job.

In order to avoid insanity from taking over her home life as she juggles the demands of running a company that sells whimsical wall decals, she has now also outsourced many of the mundane but necessary tasks of running her household by having hired help seven days a week.

That gives this successful businesswoman time to spend with her children and filmmaker husband, and the flexibility to be a volunteer counselor at her son's camp when he is having trouble adjusting, or to do such things as make pinch pots with her kids.

 

Read on to find out how Allison managed to live her dream on an idea inspired by the empty walls of children's rooms and find out how you can win a little bit of WallCandy of your own.

This Mom is Top Chef

San Francisco Food Writer Tara Duggan has authored a cookbook about how to make fresh, healthy meals even when you are busy. But with two young daughters, she faces the same problem as any of us — the fight over the magical box.

Dahlia, 6, and Elsie, 3, love boxed macaroni and cheese, she said, which she buys only occasionally when her husband is feeding them or a babysitter is coming over. “They almost die with excitement,” Tara said. “When I make fancy homemade mac ‘n cheese, my older daughter says, “This isn‘t mac ‘n cheese mom!”

To juggle the demands of a full-time job and a family, the award-winning writer tries out recipes at home once in a while, making them for dinner to test them on her family. Many of the recipes from her San Francisco Chronicle column, “The Working Cook” ended up in her book, “The Working Cook, Fast and Fresh Meals for Busy People.” 

Read on for the interview and to find out how you can win a copy of her book.

La Petite Baleen’s Anya Hall Makes A Splash As Our First Interview Subject

We are starting a weekly series of interviews with interesting working moms, be they Mompreneurs, established business owners or just interesting folk with interesting jobs. We are kicking off the series with an interview with Anya Hall, one of the owners of La Petite Baleen swim school in San Francisco and the daughter of the founders.

Anya was literally thrown into the family business — a swim school started by her parents Irene and John in the backyard pool of their Half Moon Bay home in 1979. Along with her brother and sister, she was the “guinea pig” for the fledgling school. She swam competitively from the age of 12, and while many of her friends at UC Berkeley jumped into the dot com frenzy after graduation, she realized that her heart was still in the pool. She has been with the family business since then (in fact, she was one of my son Cash’s first swim teachers at La Petite Baleen), and helps to run swim schools in Half Moon Bay, San Bruno and San Francisco that teach 9,000 children in weekly year round lessons.

Now the mother of 21-month-old Tatum and five months pregnant with a boy, she is a partner with her parents and her husband Christian in the family’s newest swim school in the Presidio of San Francisco. She works part-time managing the business’ marketing and coordinating training and curriculum but admits that she has work “boundary” issues because she often handles marketing from the park and said that every family meal turns into a business meeting. But she does find a way to relax that made me jealous. Read on to discover her secrets for juggling a demanding business and a growing family.