A couple weeks ago I was watching Good Morning America (I know, I’m such a suburban mom) and they were talking about “push presents.” I’ve talked about the idea of giving a mother jewelry after the birth of a child but I never knew there was an actual name for it! And such an obnoxious name at that. I have some new opinions on the topic after watching the story on GMA and also after having a baby myself.

The story on GMA had some really ridiculous examples of actual “push presents” women received for having a baby. One woman they talked to had a diamond bracelet her husband bought her after having their baby. They also had examples from Hollywood of celebrities spending thousands and thousands of dollars on presents for women having babies. I think their examples were completely crazy.

I think I said before that if I had a baby, I wanted a present. I’ve totally changed my mind. The baby is my gift. My husband’s support through pregnancy and his help in taking care of our son is my gift. I don’t need him to spend money on me that we could put into a college fund for our baby. Of course, I am in a little bit of a different situation than most people.

I happened to have a diamond baby (born in April.) He was supposed to be born in May which would have been Emerald but both worked for me. I liked the idea of May baby because I have an Emerald from my grandmother

but April works too because I have a nice diamond pendant that I wear all the time.

I don’t need to spend any money to have pieces with my child’s birthstone. I also have an extensive collection of stones that would cover pretty much any month. Even if only had the stone, I don’t think I would have pushed to have piece made right after my son’s birth.

I think mothers’ jewelry is very fun and special but I think it has to be sensible and I don’t think it should be a reward for having a baby. I will probably wait until I am finished having children and maybe even until we have a lot of money saved for their college funds before I spend any money on myself. Having a baby should be the reason for having a baby, not diamonds.

Men may not know this, but when a woman has a baby, it is appropriate to get her a gift. I am totally of the feeling that if a woman has a baby, she deserves a present. This may be a controversial opinion, but when I have a baby, I want some recognition! Jewelry is of course, a pretty popular gift for this occasion.

If you are planning on having a lot of kids, jewelry might not be the best gift because it can get expensive and the chances of the mother wearing all of the jewelry is slimmer the more jewelry she has. If you are planning for 1 or 2 kinds, heck yeah jewelry is completely appropriate.

When buying a gift for a new mother, I don’t think the gift has to be about the child if you don’t want it to be. I think diamond studs or a simple pendant are just as appropriate as something with birthstones. In fact, I might wait on anything with birthstones until you are finished having children and make one piece with all of the birthstones. If you do want to buy a gift for the new mother that represents her new child, make sure you know her taste so you don’t just buy something to buy something. Believe it or not, there are women who don’t like heart, mother/child jewelry, or colors of gemstones just because it is either their or their child’s birthstone. But there are women that do like those things and would wear jewelry like that every day of their lives.

The moral of the story=buy the woman in your life a present if she has a baby, she’ll appreciate it I promise. But don’t just buy her jewelry to buy her jewelry. If you are going to invest in a piece of jewelry, make sure she’ll love and wear it everyday even after that child is grown up.

The last piece I finished for a customer would fall into the catagory of “Grandmother’s Jewelry.” It may sound silly but it is a fun way for grandmothers (or grandfather if they are into jewelry) to express their love for their grandchildren through jewelry.

For this piece I was working with a woman I know from jazzercise. I’ve known her for about a year now so I was super excited when she said she wanted to have a piece of jewelry made. She has 3 grown children who have started to have children themselves. Like most grandparents, her grandkids are definitely a light in her life and she wanted a pendant to represent each one of them. The problem was that her kids are not finished having kids so the pendant had to be designed in a way that she could add stones to but that would look good before it was full of stones also. She currently has two grandchildren that were born in June (alexandrite), one who was born in September (sapphire), and one who was born in January (garnet). Here are 2 ideas that I came up with to solved this problem.

The top pendant is actually individual pieces that can be soldered together as they are added. This idea has unlimited space for adding more pieces but if there are too many, the pendant could get really wide. The second piece (the heart) has a surface design with holes in it so it easy to add flush set stones into the holes as more stones are called for but the pieces doesn’t look funny if all of the holes aren’t filled. My client has 3 children and she thought 8 stones would probably be the maximum needed but I designed the piece to hold 13 just in case–plus having 1 hole not filled might not look as good as if there are 5 holes not filled.

She decided to go with the heart design because she liked the idea of a heart and while the heart was a little bit more money to get started, it was less expensive to add stones to so in the long run it will probably end up being less expensive.

I think the piece turned out really nicely and the colors worked together much better than anyone expected. I am looking forward to adding more stones to this pieces as my client has more grandchildren!

Fortunately for her, rubies can be quite pink and pink would look great with her other colors!

Then there is the next problem; there are 3 different stones which makes it impossible to make the ring symmetrical. I tried adding her and her husband’s birthstones in but both of those are amethyst. The color works well, but it doesn’t help with symmetry.
My first thought would be to have a wide band with the stones randomly on the top of the band in bezels. Again, we had another problem; she doesn’t wear big rings.

I thought that this design manages to accomplish everything she wanted without being too big. I used one larger amethyst for the middle to symbolize her and her husband with the smaller stones at the end of wavy cut outs to represent the children.

The band of the ring will still be the most prominent aspect of the design but it is only about 7mm wide. The bezel set stones will add a clean, modern flair to the ring but the colors shouldn’t be too overwhelming so as to make the ring look gaudy.

My friend’s third and last child was born in July 2008. I think she has waited long enough for a mother’s ring so I hope she likes this design so we can move forward with making it for her!