Tanya Jedovnicky had her first baby, Kenza, and then two more in quick succession. She’s now mum to three children under three, including her youngest, Presley. Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, she also founded Maison Elle, an Australian baby brand built around Sleepy Elle, an organic cotton comforter that arrives in its own keepsake suitcase.
The brand’s origin story is a familiar one to any parent who’s lost a beloved comfort object: on holiday in Byron Bay, Kenza found a second-hand comforter the family named Elle. She went everywhere with them. Then one day, she didn’t come home. “Nothing I could find came close,” Tanya says. “Everything was either beautiful and useless, or useful and quietly awful to live with.” So she made her own – a process that took 12 months, four rounds of samples, and two sourcing trips, the second of which happened while she was eight weeks pregnant with Presley.
Here, Tanya shares what three very different babies, three caesareans, and one very honest reckoning with the baby industry taught her.
1. You can’t buy your way to certainty
“I spent far too much time trying to buy certainty. I practically lived in baby shops, followed other mothers’ lists and bought almost everything the internet recommended,” Tanya says of preparing for Kenza. “I redesigned the nursery a dozen times and had a rocking chair upholstered in pink velvet. Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking. It wasn’t me at all.”
By baby number three, the approach had changed completely. “Presley has a few things of his own for when we go out, but I buy bigger sizes now so he actually gets to wear them.”
2. The newborn wardrobe is a trap
Ask Tanya what to leave off the shopping list, and the answer comes fast. “The newborn wardrobe. I bought beautiful little outfits that Kenza barely wore before she grew out of them. We also had a bottle warmer and an oversized steriliser that hardly got used… Much of it was out of the house within a month.”
Her replacement system is refreshingly low-tech: “I bathed my children in the kitchen sink until they were too big, and it worked just fine. Trust me, the clutter adds up. Start with less, then see what you actually need.”
What she did reach for constantly: “Muslins, organic cotton stretch swaddles, a bouncer and a carrier. And nappy caddies. If you spend time with the baby in more than one room, get a few and keep them stocked. You do not want to go looking for wipes while holding a baby who needs changing.”
3. Structure isn’t restrictive… it’s what gives you your life back
Tanya was told, like most first-time mothers, to brace for sleep to become “a distant memory.” She didn’t accept it. “We keep a firm routine, with meals, naps and bedtime at the same hours every day. I’ve followed it from birth with all three of my children. All three have slept through the night since six weeks, including Presley. My girls now sleep independently from seven to seven.”
The payoff went well beyond sleep. “My husband and I have our evenings. I built a business in the hours those evenings gave back to me, with three children under three asleep down the hall. Structure has never felt restrictive to me. Structure is what created the freedom.”
4. Becoming a mother doesn’t mean disappearing from your own life
“Kenza taught me that becoming a mother did not require withdrawing from my own life,” Tanya says. “At six weeks old, she was at the hair salon being adored by the entire room, then coming with me to Pilates and PT. I did almost everything I had done before. I simply had this gorgeous little person beside me in the pram.”
That philosophy has stuck. “The children come grocery shopping, help with the washing, wipe their table and carry their plates to the sink, mostly successfully. I play my music in the car and they love it. Children can feel when you are happy. Motherhood changed my life. It did not erase who I was. My life expanded to include them and became infinitely richer.”
5. There’s no “correct” way to birth or feed your baby
Tanya had a caesarean with Kenza, who was breech – “a decision was made for us, medically and sensibly.” But she’d absorbed enough birth content online to feel like she’d taken a shortcut. “I genuinely wondered whether people would think I had taken the easy way out. Let me put that one to rest. A caesarean is major abdominal surgery, and then you go home and care for a newborn.”
Breastfeeding brought its own reckoning. After a difficult start, she moved to formula. “Moving to formula was a revelation. I could see exactly how much she was drinking, build a rhythm and protect my mental health. And for anyone who imagines formula is a shortcut, it is not. There is the sterilising, the bottles, the preparing and doing it all again a few hours later. The work does not disappear.”
Her advice is blunt and useful in equal measure: “If you want to breastfeed, breastfeed. If you do not, do not. Just make sure the decision belongs to you and is not a performance for somebody else.”
6. Motherhood is not a performance for other people
“I could sit here and tell you I had a water birth and that I am wonderfully easygoing. I could give you the version that goes down well,” Tanya says. “But the longer you are a mother, the less you care what anyone thinks, and it is genuinely liberating. Not indifference. Just clarity. You stop auditioning and start running your family exactly as you want it.”
She’s also unbothered about opting out of the mothers’ group circuit. “I went to one mothers’ group and chose not to return. The conversation that day seemed to revolve around how hard and limiting motherhood was, and that mindset was not useful to me. I knew it would be demanding. I simply refused to let hard become the whole story, or to treat those early years as something to be survived.”
7. Prepare yourself, not just the nursery
If Tanya could remove five things from a first-time mum’s list, the pink velvet rocking chair goes first, followed by most of the newborn wardrobe, every button-up onesie (“A puzzle disguised as an outfit. Zips exist.”), the nappy stockpile, and – most of all – the idea that there’s one correct way to be a good mother.
“That definition came from somebody else and it will not fit her,” she says. “She does not have to birth, feed, dress, settle or structure her family the way anyone else did. And she will not feel ready, because nobody does. You go anyway.”
The preparation that actually mattered, she says, had nothing to do with shopping. “It was deciding what kind of mother I wanted to be and what kind of household we wanted to run. My husband and I sat down before the baby came and talked it through properly. How we would handle the hard hours. Who would do what. What we were not willing to lose. Call it a strategy meeting if you like, but it meant we were not negotiating the basics at our most exhausted.”
8. Postpartum hormones are more convincing than you’d expect
Tanya experienced depression and anxiety during her first pregnancy, and describes it candidly. “My first pregnancy brought on depression and anxiety. I had always been a happy person, so I found that frightening. I didn’t enjoy being pregnant at all.” A scan that raised alarming, ultimately unfounded possibilities about Kenza’s growth sent her anxiety “into overdrive,” leading to fortnightly appointments and support from a psychiatrist.
Looking back, the biggest lesson was about how temporary those feelings were. “I wish I’d known during that first pregnancy that how I felt then wasn’t necessarily how I would feel forever,” she says. And with hindsight from three babies in: “What I did not understand the first time was how convincing postpartum hormones could be. Every emotion arrived feeling entirely real and entirely permanent. Speaking with someone helped me separate the feeling from the fact. Motherhood can make you laugh and cry inside the same minute, usually before breakfast.”
9. You will not get it right … and it doesn’t matter
Tanya is refreshingly upfront that three kids under three still comes with hard hours. “I call four until seven the afternoon shift. Bathing, dressing and feeding three under three, all of them wanting me at once, and someone always needing something, usually an Elsa Band-Aid for an injury that does not exist.”
But the bigger picture holds. “Marrying my husband and having our children are the two greatest things that have ever happened to me. I would not change a moment of it. Motherhood has made me softer, more compassionate and, I think, a nicer person. I feel genuinely privileged to be their mum.”
Her closing message to any mum currently trying to get it all right: “You will not, and it does not matter. Do it your way. Your children do not need you to disappear in order to know they are deeply loved.”
