Dear Friends,

Please bear with me over the next few hours (days?) while I get all the kinks worked out.

The Albany Yoga Mamas are an informal and growing community of moms in the Albany and greater Capital Region of New York. We serve as a resource for women to meet other local moms for friendship, play-dates and outings. The website and forum contain a wealth of information about family friendly activities and local professionals and services.

The original group members met in a prenatal yoga class, at the Albany Kripalu Yoga Center, in early 2005. Since that time our ranks have grown to include friends and neighbors who also have small children. We hope this will also include you. Please stop by the forum and introduce yourself.

The Yoga Mama Story

While taking prenatal yoga, one of the aspects I enjoyed the most was the camaraderie with the other women in the class. I know for many of us, particularly those who are new to the area, it has been a great opportunity for developing friendships with women who are at a similar stage in their lives and who have or will have children very close in age. Our post-prenatal-class Professor Java's snack sessions were always the highlight of my week. It was an opportunity to commiserate about the foot stuck between our ribs, exchange information about vital resources like good pediatricians and most importantly, be in the company of those who “got where I was coming from.”

After we graduated from prenatal yoga, many of us went on to the moms and babies and tots yoga classes while others returned to work or stayed home with older children. We had occasional luncheons and excursions and emailed voraciously. New friends from the classes joined our “group” and we started informally referring to ourselves as the Yoga Mamas. As our email accounts overflowed, it became clear that we needed a centralized location for our collective knowledge. Thus was born the Yoga Mama Forum and Web site.