Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday, April 12, for Milk Guide, which offers anything from lactation education to troubleshooting latch and positioning, as well as introducing a bottle, pumping basics and more. Pictured from left Scott Wiley, chamber member relations manager; Chad Hummel, Silveus Insurance, chamber ambassador; Danielle Henderson and Grace Hultquist, Milk Guide; Glenn Hall, Stillwater Hospice, chamber ambassador; Raquel Kline, Paddock Springs, chamber ambassador; and Rob Parker, chamber president and CEO. Photo by David Slone, Times Union

By David Slone
Times-Union

WARSAW — Before and after a family welcomes an infant into the world, the women of Milk Guide want to be there to help set the moms up for success.

Grace Hultquist, Milk Guide certified lactation counselor, said, “We are a team of lactation consultants. We are a private practice, so we’re not affiliated with any of the hospitals in the area, and we provide prenatal education, as well as postpartum support to the families in the area.”

They have a clinic they operate out of in Osceola, but they also do in-home consultations and virtual services.

“So we can meet moms and babies right at their home, or we have a telehealth platform that is secure that we can do virtual consults with them as well,” Hultquist said.

Tuesday, the Kosciusko County Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Milk Guide at the chamber office in Warsaw.

Milk Guide works with different insurance providers so the majority of their patients are able to utilize the services Milk Guide provides without having to pay anything because it’s a zero co-pay service, Hultquist explained. For those whose insurance Milk Guide doesn’t take, she said they have “pretty decent” self-pay rates and then all of their prenatal education is offered at no cost so the moms are set up for success when the baby comes.

Danielle Henderson, Milk Guide, international board-certified lactation consultant, said they have a free support group that meets at the Chamber, 523 S. Buffalo St., Warsaw, at 9 a.m. every Friday. They also have virtual and in-person classes at the Chamber, which are free if a person’s insurance doesn’t cover them.

Explaining how she got into lactation consulting, Henderson said she has a dietetic degree and is a registered dietetic technician.

“I was always very interested in breastfeeding, not just how much better it is and the benefits of it for mom and baby, and just really society as a whole, but I also was just very interested in the management part of it. It takes a lot of work. It’s a full-time job, plus. And so sometimes problems happen and at the time, there wasn’t a lot of lactation consultants out there to help filter some of those issues,” Henderson said.

She worked at Women Infant Children for several years, always wanting to take her path into the breastfeeding field. She had four children of her own that she breastfed.

“I just really felt like it comes in highs and lows, and what works for one child doesn’t always work for your next child, so it just takes a lot of support from family, it takes a lot of support from employers and then from people like us who can help filter out all those issues and get you through,” she said.

For Hultquist, she didn’t foresee lactation consulting as being something she was going to do professionally. She was in medical sales prior to this and that’s where she saw her career going.

“But I had a baby in August of 2021 and, after he was born, we had a ton of issues with nursing. My mom, my sister and all of my friends who had done it in the past just told me it was super easy, so when I was faced with some challenges and struggled to find the help that I needed and struggled to find a lactation consultant that could walk me through those challenges, I just felt like there was a need in our community for more people that were willing and able to help,” she said.

Hultquist left her job in medical sales and went back and took the classes she needed to be able to sit for the board exam. In addition to being a certified lactation counselor, she is training to be an international board-certified lactation consultant.

“I decided I wanted to be the advocate for people that are needing help and I want to be able to help someone meet those goals because sometimes without support and someone to lean on, we saw moms decide to give up and quit and it might be a matter of something simple or just not knowing what they don’t know, so it was just this career was really driven by my passion from my own personal experience and then hoping to prevent people from going through what I went through,” she said.

Henderson said many of the patients they see are seen prenatally and that’s what they prefer, if possible.

“A lot of times the prevention of issues happens because you see us prenatally. We can kind of tell you what to expect and when you should be asking for help before something gets chaotic and hard. So a lot of our clients we see prenatally, but then some of them are newborn, some are 4 months into it, some are like 10 months and they really want to breastfeed until their child is 1 or 2. So, we kind of see all ages,” Henderson said.

Hultquist said at Milk Guide a lot of the lactation consultants are “pretty passionate about oral therapy and rehabilitation for babies, so we also tend to come across babies that are needing our help if they have tongue or lip ties.”

She said they work a lot with those babies pre- and post-operation to help maximize the results from the procedure and to make sure breastfeeding is going well through that procedure as well.

A Baby Expo is planned for 2-4 p.m. May 20 at Deb Collier’s School of Dance, Warsaw. There will be baby photographers, daycares and other services represented. Each of the vendors will be doing a giveaway.

Milk Guide’s website can be found at www.milkguide.com/.