A writer for the Royse City Herald Banner did a little article about my wife. I thought I would post the link here to brag on her a little bit. I hope you don't mind.
Here's the full article:
Published: July 30, 2009 02:50 pm
Home schooling, home businesses, and home-based
Royse City mom responds to needs with homespun enterprise
Leslie Gibson
Royse City Herald-Banner
Seven children, three home-based businesses, one family business, year-round home schooling, five acres, and a menagerie of goats, ducks, chickens, geese and dogs — how does she do it?
Jessica Rodriguez of Royse City said that sometimes the dishes don’t get done.
“I just want to say, it’s one of those things where not everything gets done to the best of your ability. If you have umpteen different people around all the time and you are responsible for the every one of the people ... sometimes there are a few dishes left in the sink,” she said from a small side-space of their home, from which the family distributes organic produce in a co-op.
“Sometime these kids (ages 9 months to 15 years) are going to be grown and gone and I will pine after them,” she said.
Holding baby Jack, nine months, while 12-year-old Molly made jewelry, Rodriguez showed some of the products she has developed to sell, each one an outgrowth of desires to do better for her family’s care.
For example, diaper rash on her fourth child prompted her to move away from the disposable diapers which are chemically treated. She bought some cloth diapers and thought, “I can make these,” having been a seamstress since she was nine years old.
For six years now, she creates a style of snap-closure diaper crafted of the best features she has found. Next to her babies’ skin is soft, silky smooth bamboo fabric, held in an outside packet of polyurethane. An extra pad sewn in makes the diapers more absorbent, but she does not want to disrupt natural potty-training — a “dry” diaper does not encourage a child to learn to use the toilet. “It is quicker to potty-train, much quicker,” she said.
She makes three sizes for sale. Each diaper costs $20. Over the lifetime of use, one should save $2,000, she said. Keeping a child in disposables until age three is about $3,600. A “lifetime” supply of 60 diapers, 20 in each size, is $1,200.
“Do you know how long it takes for a paper diaper to deteriorate?” she asked. “More than seven years. A cloth diaper — six months.”
However, she noted, “My whole reason for doing this started out with I had one with really bad diaper rash,” she said. She has clothed her fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh child in the diapers.
It was a skin problem which prompted her soap making — this time a malignant mass of tissue on her face, which turned out to be 2.5 millimeters deep and 4 millimeters long. It was removed.
“I really got into skin care after that,” she said, by buying natural products. “That’s how the whole soap thing started.
She offers a line of olive oil based soaps and include oil of palm and of coconut, shea butter, as well as milk from her family’s goats.
Her husband Craig supplied the $300 to $400 start-up, but was skeptical, she said. “You are never going to make that back,” she said he thought. “I have made that back,” she said. Her “She Saponifies” website, which contains unasked for testimonials to the soaps, generates the most sales as opposed to setting up at festivals, she said. She also sells at the Royse City Main Street Farmers Market.
Rodriguez is a sharer, as well — she prints on her website the ingredients and instructions of her laundry soap start pack. For $6, the borax, soda and grated hand soap starter kit will do 200 loads of laundry.
Meanwhile, back at the Lone Star Italian Ice — yes, another business — this one her husband’s dream — Craig is serving the softly-icy fruit-flavored treats known as “water ice” up north, which he and the family fell in love with during their time in Philadelphia, where he completed graduate school in finance.
The difference between this 80-hour a week work and that of his three years at TXU while helping facilitate the largest leveragedbuy-out in U.S. history, is that he can be more involved in the children’s lives. They can help him at the shop, and he spends mornings at home.
In his executive position, husband and wife talked to each other about 15 minutes a day, during his lunch hour. Neither was happy with the lack of time together. “I got tired of not being around my family,” Craig said.
“This is my first entrepreneurial venture. I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a long time.”
“It’s not for everybody. You have nobody to blame but yourself. But you get all the rewards. I like the idea of teaching our kids to be that entrepreneurial,” he said.
The Rodriguez family moved to their old farmhouse south of the Interstate in Royse City almost two years ago from Richardson.
“Craig found it on the Internet. It used to be a bed and breakfast of Annie and James Cornelius,” she said. “We thought they were wonderful to buy from, but to have them as neighbors is even more of a blessing,” she said, and is having Jack and Gay Bostick as neighbors.
“We’ve never had neighbors like that,” she said, of the folks who fix their roof, or help with the animals.
“When we lived in Richardson we didn’t know anyone.”
This fall will mark the second anniversary of their living in Royse City, and it is in that time that they’ve started the soap business, the Italian Ice business, the organic produce co-op, and raising chickens and goats, from which they use the eggs and milk.
Dane, age 15, milks the goats expertly, Jessica said. Ethan takes care of the chickens, and Hudson, age 7, feeds the geese.
The family attends Greenville Family Church, which has a lot of home-schooling members, Jessica said.
Home schooling was something she used to think was crazy, she said.
Like the rest of the family ventures, it developed as a practical answer to fit needs at the time.
“I want the best the best the best for any endeavor I go into,” she said. “I want the best for my family, and I want the best for my customers.”
