Kelli Gillespie Richardson and I met when working in and around the media world. As our careers grew, so did our families. Picture two career women literally wearing their babies to press junkets and TV stations, and frantically changing diapers before jumping on air. It sounds crazy, but we made it work! Our friends suggested we share our crazy experiences with others so we took their advice and created Family Entourage—a place to celebrate and support growing families. We continue to juggle our careers, families and our growing blog network from sunny San Diego, which brings us to our need for sun protection…
Living in San Diego, we are outside year-round. We always prepare for sun exposure when we’re at the pool or beach, but the reality is that we are exposed as soon as we step outside the house. The easy solution…sunscreen! But picture this…every time you step out of your front door the sun is blazing and you need to cover your toddler or young kiddo in sunscreen. Whether you’re at the San Diego Zoo or La Jolla Beach, we have to chase down our kiddos every 1-2 hours and slather them down. This resulted in a lot of stress, sunscreen in the eyes, sand and mud sticking to our kiddos, sometimes for days. We needed a better solution for our kids, our readers and our sanity!
Kelli and I were first introduced to Coolibar when researching a TV segment on Pool Party Ideas. The amount of information available on water safety and teaching kids to swim was huge. But what we also discovered in our research was that one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in the course of a lifetime. We were blown away! This revelation really opened our eyes to the need for sun protection, and how best to use/wear it.
After that initial Pool Party Ideas segment where we tried out Coolibar, our families have been wearing it everywhere. We also make sure we’re ‘modeling’ it during any and all TV segments where we can recommend sun-protective clothing. It’s our way of using our voice to help local parents tackle sun safety. If our blog helps keep families sun-safe and cancer-free, we’ll keep spreading the word. Education and awareness is everything and we don’t want any families to be a part of the ‘1 in 5’ statistic.
