We’re Wooten & Adam Schmitz, owners and operators of The Milky Way in Charlotte, NC.  We are partners in love, life, family and business.  What could be better than that? 

 

We wanted to get our store and this website up and running because we are dedicated to helping new moms discover the joys of breastfeeding while helping them overcome some of the challenges facing nursing presents.  We say “parents” because it takes both of you to make it work. 

 

We nursed our first child Zeke (now 4 ½) for 19 months but needed lots and lots of support in those first few trying weeks.  That support was readily available to us in Los Angeles, but in talking to friends elsewhere, we soon came to realize that many other families were not so fortunate.  From our experience with the birth of Zeke, the idea of The Milky Way was born.

 

We moved from L.A. to Charlotte and opened our first store in September 2003.  Since then, we've had another child, Josephine (born April 3, 2004) and another almost-as-demanding child – a second retail location within the Carolinas Medical Center hospital system.  Believe it or not, Josephine is still nursing on occasion for comfort and immunity defense purposes (she’s well past 2 ½). We’re debating whether to call Breastfeeders Anonymous and stage an intervention with the little rascal.  But all seriousness aside, she’s a very healthy, happy and well-adjusted child and some of that is owed to her extensive nursing regimen. 

 

And through it all, we feel we’ve found immeasurable success, success that cannot be measured by a count of the till’s receipts but by the amount of new families we’ve been fortunate enough to help.  We also derive great satisfaction from being able to meet so many smart, cool and interesting people, from whom we’ve learned as much or more than they’ve learned from us.

 

We hope that our services and products will be of great help and satisfaction to you.  That would truly give us even greater satisfaction.