Think of it as boot camp for moms and babies

At Baby Boot Camp, the babies are really pretty lazy. They just sit there in their strollers: babbling, sucking on fingers, staring off in the distance.

They don’t even seem to mind that mom is running, jumping, sweating, lunging, laughing and chatting.

Erin Ruff, a West Linn resident who pushes her double stroller up and down hills in Southwest Portland’s Gabriel Park, calls it “mommy’s play time.”

“It’s my lifeline,” Ruff said, adding that after she had her daughter Molly, she tried to do exercises at home, but she was never able to get back to her pre-pregnancy weight.

“It’s hard to get motivated when you have little ones running around your ankles,” she said.

But then Ruff found Baby Boot Camp, and the pounds started coming off. Even after having her son, Atticus, she got back to pre-Molly weight in six months.

“And I think it really made a difference in that pregnancy (with Atticus),” she said.

This class, the first stroller fitness program in the Northwest, started in Gabriel Park three years ago and has expanded to parks all over Portland and Beaverton.

Head instructor Erin Shirey thought of the concept after she had her daughter, Makenzie. With a background in kinesthesiology and a focus on encouraging women’s self-esteem through exercise, the Beaverton resident wanted to design a course that would keep mom and baby together.

But when she looked up possible names, she found that “Baby Boot Camp” was already trademarked. Investigating a little deeper, she found Kristen Horler’s nationally acclaimed program and signed up to start a franchise in Portland.

Shirey is now the Northwest regional manager and just received the Franchise of the Year award for her franchise that has grown to more than two dozen classes in the Portland metro area.

“My goal is to have every mom have a class she can go to,” Shirey said.

Dads are welcome to come as well, and when they do, they find out that their wives aren’t just taking a stroll around the park.

“When they come, it’s a lot harder than they think,” said Shirey’s husband, Jack, who sometimes helps teach classes. “They get a rude awakening that this is tough for anybody.”

Building an exercise ethic

The classes are designed like a boot camp fitness program: running or jogging in between jumping jacks, resistance cord exercises, lunges and other exercises. So that the moms and tots both stay engaged, no two days’ workouts are exactly alike and there are plenty of accommodations for a variety of fitness levels.

The unique structure of the class means that this isn’t just another group workout, Shirey said.

“Their kids might be crying, they might be crying,” and instructors have to be ready to handle that, she said.

Shirey said she and her instructors have to think of ways the workout will be fun and safe for the children, as well as the parents. For example, the strollers might be used as obstacles that parents run around, tickling the children as they pass.

Shirey also puts a special emphasis on building self-esteem to help women feel better about their post-partum bodies.

“They’ve had this beautiful baby, but they don’t feel comfortable in their clothes,” she said. “So our job is to help them feel comfortable.”

Shirey has also worked hard to create a social network among the class members, with a social calendar, play dates and parental resources.

“She’s just built a great network of women,” said Shaunna Levy of Southwest Portland. “It allows you to exercise while still being social.”

But the moms are also really excited about the message they are sending to their children.

At the end of the hour, the tots are pulled out of their strollers while the moms chat about allergies and compare height and weight percentiles. One of the youngest children starts doing plié squats, while two of the oldest invent a familiar game of “run around” with exercise stations.

For her children, Molly and Atticus, “exercise is a fun and regular part of life,” Ruff said.

For all these reasons, Levy said she’ll keep doing it as long as her 7-week-old can stay in the stroller.

“I love it,” she said, adding half-jokingly: “I may have to have another one just to stay with it.”

Free Mother’s Day event

Try out Baby Boot Camp for free at the Mother’s Day class in Washington Park, beginning at 9 a.m. Friday, May 9. Meet below the Rose Garden Park. More than 100 moms and dads are expected to attend the event with fitness challenges, a raffle for Doernbecher Children’s Hospital and goody bags. Reserve a space by May 7 at erin.shireybabybootcamp.com or 503-703-1269.

Beaverton classes are planned at Tualatin Hills Park and Recreation Athletic Complex, 158th and Southwest Walker Road (level 2) Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:30 a.m. and Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m.; plus (level 1) on Tuesday and Thursday at 10 a.m.

Classes will begin at additional Beaverton locations later in the summer.

from:http://www.beavertonvalleytimes.com/features/story.php?story_id=121017947589733600

Has child, will travel – a lot

Colin Eatock talks to Canadian soprano sensation and biomedical engineering grad Isabel Bayrakdarian about life on the opera circuit with her five-month-old son

COLIN EATOCK

Special to The Globe and Mail

May 6, 2008

Isabel Bayrakdarian opens the door to her dressing room at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. On the windowsill is the long, auburn wig she will wear as Mélisande, in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Pelléas et Mélisande opening tonight. Hanging on the closet door are her radiantly colourful costumes.

The conversation, however, soon turns to babies – a topic of much interest to Bayrakdarian these days. “It ends with us not knowing whose baby she has,” she says of Debussy’s only opera, “whether it’s Pélleas’s or Golaud’s – or whether she had conceived before meeting Golaud. Mélisande is unlike any other role I’ve portrayed, because musically and dramatically it’s so very ambiguous.”

The 34-year-old Toronto-based soprano continues, explaining how the ending of the work has a personal significance for her, as a new mother herself. “The first time we rehearsed the final scene – when Mélisande is too weak to raise her arms to hold her newborn child – I found it very disturbing.” For the performances, she has requested that the eyes on the theatrical doll be closed, so as not to look so lifelike.

The birth five months ago of Ari, to Bayrakdarian and her pianist husband, Serouj Kradjian, hasn’t slowed her down. While she did have to withdraw from rehearsals for The Marriage of Figaro at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the fall as her due date approached, she has bounced right back into professional life. She has recently appeared in concerts and recitals in New York; San Francisco; St. Paul, Minn.; and Kansas City, Mo.; and in a production of Don Pasquale in Denver.

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“My baby has been travelling with me ever since he was one month old,” she says. “He’s been very co-operative – it’s almost as if he knew what he was getting into! When he’s older, things will change, but that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get to it.”

It was 10 years ago Bayrakdarian sang her first role with the COC: the Sandman in Hansel and Gretel. She was just 24, fresh out of the COC’s Ensemble Studio training program. If her degree in biomedical engineering didn’t point to a singing career, her win at Placido Domingo’s Operalia Competition in 2000 certainly did. Since then, her ascent to the heights of her profession has been swift and sure – guided by a careful selectivity and a wide-ranging eclecticism.

“Initially,” she recalls, “I turned down a lot of engagements, when other singers were saying, ‘Oh my God, I would love to have that opportunity.’ When I was 21, I was asked to sing Liu in Turandot, but said no thank you.”

Deciding that Puccini’s big-voiced roles could wait, she turned to Mozart: to Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro and Pamina in The Magic Flute.

Critics have been impressed with her Mozart. The New York Times declared her Pamina “beautiful in every way you can be: in singing, in comportment, in looks.” And the San Diego Union-Tribune recently credited her with bringing “alluring expertise” to the role of Susanna.

Yet she willfully resists being pigeonholed. “I’ve always been known as a Mozart interpreter. I’ve done a lot of Susannas – you could wake me up a 3 a.m. and I could sing it, and prompt the other performers at the same time. But sometimes you need the thrill of learning something new. I don’t understand how some singers can bring freshness and novelty to a couple of roles that they do all the time. I’m not one of those singers – I need the stimulation of new excitement.”

Even as she built a reputation for Mozart, Bayrakdarian cultivated other musical interests: 20th-century opera and Italian bel canto roles. “I’m very fortunate,” she notes, “because people who do casting ‘get’ me. I have been offered interesting parts because the people who make the decisions know that if they ask me to do a role, I’m going to do it justice.”

Also, her skills as a recitalist have won her much praise. “What impressed me most,” reported a critic for Opera News magazine, after a 2005 Carnegie Hall performance, “was that she chose not to take the audience by storm; instead, she captured it by stealth.”

And she has followed pathways that have led her away from the tried-and-true classical repertoire. She sang on the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings movie The Two Towers, and also for Atom Egoyan’s film Ararat. She has taken an interest in Latin-American music and has recorded a CD of tango songs for CBC Records.

It was Bayrakdarian’s first journey to Armenia in 2004 that inspired her current fascination with the music of her ancestral homeland. “In Armenia,” she says, “when you walk on the ground, you feel 1,700 years of Christianity right in the soil. … it puts in perspective a huge history you can’t really grasp if you’re not there. I promised myself I would return, and I have.”

In the capital city of Yerevan, she performed with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra and with local folk musicians. The trip was documented in the film The Long Journey Home, aired on CBC. (She can also be heard singing in Armenia, accompanied by a group of musicians playing a flute-like instrument called the duduk, on YouTube.) In the fall, she will undertake a tour with some of the musicians she worked with in Armenia; there’s a Toronto performance at Roy Thomson Hall on Oct. 17.

For the next few months, however, opera is dominating her schedule: Pelléas et Mélisande in Toronto, followed by The Marriage of Figaro in Munich (her last Susanna for a while) and the title role in The Cunning Little Vixen in Japan.

Beyond that, she is deliberately vague. “I don’t believe in having a five-year or a 10-year plan. I already know my two-year plan – I have it in my calendar. But how I fill the voids in between my engagements is something that I like to leave to the unexpected. Who knows?”

from:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080506.ISABEL06/TPStory/TPEntertainment/Music/