Alice Benjamin

Cardiac Nurse, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles, CA

Figure Flaw: Packs weight around mid-section

What She Wore Before: The boxy top may hide a tummy, but it does nothing–especially in a color that washes out a beautiful creamy brown complexion–to flatter a perfectly nice figure.

Scrubs Makeover: Now we’re talkin’!  Feminine piping around the neckline accentuates Benjamin’s smallish bust to create the illusion of a flat tummy (though she’s hardly heavy, after having four boys, her waistline isn’t what she’d like it to be). In addition, bright blue really pops and is so much more flattering–and pretty!–than the head-to-toe khaki, which Benjamin now says looks “blah.” While her “before” scrubs were restrictive (“I was fighting with them all day!“), Benjamin loves the fabric of her new blues. “It breathes, feels soft and moves with me, which is essential in my job since I spend shifts pulling, pushing, lifting, lowering, reaching, moving all over the place.” She’s also a fan of the drawstring waist, which changes as she changes…“around the waist so I can still look good no matter how much I’ve indulged.” Urbane top, $22, and pants, $21-30.

More Options: 

Dickies Xtreme Stretch top, $24, and pants, $28
Dickies Generation Flex top, $24, and pants, $31

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Tamatha Grabin

Keeping Moms Guessing with a Special Delivery

Over dinner one night, Tamatha Grabin and her pregnant sister were discussing the downside to keeping your baby’s sex a surprise: It’s a roadblock to some of the best shopping of your life! You’re resigned to buying boring gender-neutral clothes, a limitation most moms eschew.

Grabin, a school nurse and third-party assessor for insurance companies, knew she was having a girl the first time around, but when she became pregnant again, she wanted to keep the sex a secret for the delivery room. (It was another girl!) “I was in the same boat as my sister. I loved the suspense of waiting to hear, but I hated picking out all those ugly yellow and green clothes before she was born.”

Grabin, who lives in Buffalo, Wyo., figured that there are plenty of women who forgo the surprise just so they can start shopping immediately for cute clothes in baby boy and girl colors. That’s when she had a light-bulb moment: She could offer all of these women a way to shop and keep their secrets safe. Pregnant moms could have their ultrasound results sent to Grabin, and on their due dates she would deliver a box of adorable baby clothes based on styles they’d already picked out.

And so babyriddle.com was born. Grabin’s website is packed with high-quality clothes at mid-level prices. Pregnant moms print out a form authorizing their physicians to release their baby’s gender to Grabin—and then they can shop to their heart’s content. “When her baby is born, the mom is completely surprised and completely prepared. She doesn’t have to go shopping and expose her baby to germs; she can just curl up and nest with her newborn at home,” says Grabin, who even offers a take-me-home outfit that arrives gift-wrapped, ready to tuck into a hospital bag.

“I’m always coming up with ideas, and this is a good one—there are no other companies out there doing this. Even my husband is excited about it.” Grabin notes that there are about four million babies born every year in the United States. “If I can capture just one percent of the market, that would be pretty good!”

Grabin spends about 30 hours a week on babyriddle.com, working with her vendors, marketing to ob-gyn offices around the country, building her presence on Facebook and blogging about parenting. “I’m having a blast with the business. I love connecting with women on a deep level during the most exciting time of their lives, and when I hear how much someone loved the clothes and that receiving them made her day, it actually makes my day.”

Her hope is that babyriddle.com “spreads like wildfire.” Fortunately, because she’s a substitute in the school system, she has a lot of flexibility with her “other” job (and also with her work as a third-party assessor). Grabin is emphatic that no matter how big her company grows, she will always be a school nurse. “I love kids and being a part of their lives.”

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Terri Van Houten: The Skateboarder

When a 41-year-old single mother says she’s going to “drop in,” you might assume she’s on her way to visit a friend. Not Terri Van Houten. She’s standing at the very top of a skateboard ramp, about to drop into a dance with gravity. “You’re up there thinking, ‘This is the stupidest thing,’” says Van Houten, who balances skateboarding with her job as Director of Nursing for Med-Surg Services at Glendale Adventist Medical Center outside Los Angeles. “But,” she adds with a smile, “I love the feeling of accomplishing something that your mind is telling you is totally irrational.”

It was only two years ago that she was introduced to the sport by a good friend, who happened to have a backyard ramp, courtesy of her husband. Tired of skateboarding with just guys, she invited Van Houten to join the group. “I was the only one of her friends she thought was crazy enough to try it,” says Van Houten, who has been skating ever since. Now, in addition to Monday nights at the backyard ramp, she travels to skate parks all over Southern California on weekends to practice her technique and tricks.

Her biggest accomplishment to date—aside from being a nurse manager and a mom, of course—is dropping into a six-foot bowl and “grinding the coping.” Huh? Van Houten translates: It’s a kick turn at the very top of the ramp, back axle riding along the metal pipe around the edge (that’s the coping). She laughs, “It’s a whole new language! Half the time I don’t know what my skateboarding friends are talking about. If I can do the tricks, I’m happy. I figure I don’t have to know what they’re called.”

Now she’s working on a 50-50—trying to hang her right-side wheels, front and back, on the coping, then roll back into the bowl. “There are tons of things to learn,” says Van Houten, whose only regret is that she didn’t start earlier. “I’d be so much better now!”

Turns out, there’s a whole online community of skateboarding moms, and Van Houten cops to being jealous of the veterans’ advanced moves. “In time, though, maybe I will be able to do them, too,” she says confidently. She doesn’t take formal lessons, but rather garners bits and tips from her friends and learns mostly by trial and error—emphasis on the error. “Basically you do a lot of falling—and you just try not to do that again!”

In spite of the spills, Van Houten has fallen head over heels (well, not literally, at least not yet) for skateboarding, which she finds exhilarating and so far removed from her weekday hospital environment that when she returns on Mondays, she’s fresh and eager to start working again. She also delights in defying convention. “I love the excitement of doing something challenging that people my age typically don’t do.”

In the skateboarding circles she travels in, riding is age-appropriate no matter how old you are. “I’ve met so many awesome families that skate together and it’s a wonderfully welcoming and supportive atmosphere for everyone.”

Skateboarding is a family affair for Van Houten, whose daughter has taken to the sport, though she’s not as passionate as her mom. “It’s totally backwards—sometimes she just sits and reads in the park and I’m the one skateboarding like a kid!”

Yes, she feels younger, thanks to skateboarding. What helps, too, are the workouts on her elliptical trainer two to three times a week to build lower body strength and stamina. “It may not look like it, but you do get winded skateboarding and you do need strong legs,” she says, noting, too, the other big benefit: “From a stress reduction standpoint, nothing beats spending weekends outside, being active, interacting with a lot of people you normally wouldn’t meet and focusing on something that’s just pure fun. I get to work every Monday feeling relaxed and cool.”

The only other crossover between Van Houten’s nursing and skating lives is the appreciation her friends have when they hurt themselves and she’s the voice of calm and experience: “No, there’s no break” or “Yes, you should go to the ER.” Once a nurse, always a nurse!

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Lorraine Withers, RN

Then: Airborne Platoon Leader, U.S. Army
Now: Pulmonary and Critical Care

Lorraine Withers was always interested in medicine, but when she got to West Point in 1981, her focus was simply surviving the heavy course load and the rigors of cadet-dom. “I wasn’t well prepared and it was tough,” says Withers. “It’s not your normal college experience—it’s the military 24/7, 12 months a year for four years. You have to go to every single class, no skipping; every meal; hours of sports each afternoon; regular parades and formations. You’re held accountable by your peers and you’re constantly challenged to be your best. It was rough, but I grew a lot at West Point and carried it all with me.” Medical school was relegated to the back burner.

After graduating with a general engineering degree, she fulfilled her five-year commitment to the Army at Fort Bragg, N.C., as an airborne platoon leader of 40 to 60 soldiers. “I learned so much about managing people there. And once you’ve jumped out of an airplane, you can do anything.”

Withers and her husband, whom she met at West Point (their daughter is now a junior there; their son says he’s not interested…), went to work as engineers for Procter & Gamble. It was not a good fit for her. “I didn’t like the manufacturing environment—the us-against-management mentality—and I didn’t like working with machines.” So when her husband was transferred, Withers took a couple of years off to spend time with her young kids, then eventually followed her heart to nursing school.

Withers has been a pulmonary and critical care nurse for 11 years—longer than her time spent in the Army and at Procter & Gamble combined. “I love the human element of nursing—being at the bedside of my patients and interacting with them. I like the clinical side as well, the physiology and pathology of the human body. There’s always a story unfolding: how the disease is progressing, the way the different specialists approach the problem, watching and learning how the treatments work.

“I’m excited to go to work, and I love what I do. Every day I say a prayer that I will do the right thing for my patients.”

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Chris Tower: Then, Buddhist Monk. Now, Psycho-Social Nursing

What advice do you give a 50-year-old man who has spent the last 26 years as a Buddhist monk and feels it’s time to make a career change?

The switch from monk to nurse came naturally to Chris Tower. He had spent every waking moment immersed in monastic life: He studied Buddhism, practiced meditation and learned how to bring both into his daily life at the monastery. Finally, what made a lasting impression was the time in Shasta Abbey in Northern California, when he cared for his teacher, who was ill with diabetes.

“The monastery provided great personal and spiritual growth,” says Tower. Nevertheless, he slowly began to question his commitment. “I wanted to live in the world, to take what I could from monastic life and see how it could be used outside.”

Tower left the monastery but remained a monk, helping to start a temple on the East Coast and working in Oregon, too. When he learned his father’s stomach cancer had returned, he went home to take care of him. “I drew on my experiences with my teacher, and my dad was able to pass away at home,” says Tower, who began thinking about getting a clinical social worker’s license or pursuing a career as a nurse. “I liked the fact that there were so many opportunities for people in their mid-fifties in nursing. I didn’t want to spend time and money on education and then be unable to find a job.”

Tower did his prerequisites and was welcomed with open arms by the nursing school at the College of New Rochelle in New York, despite his poor academic record at Williams College so many years ago. “Youthful exuberance,” Tower laughs.

Graduating in August 2008 at 57, Tower began work on a surgical stepdown floor at Stony Brook University Medical Center in Long Island, N.Y. “I was happy to get all that medical experience, but I realized I was more interested in the slower-paced, psycho-social aspects of nursing than the high-intensity technical side.”

That’s when Tower found the Seafield Center for drug and alcohol abuse treatment in West Hampton, N.Y. He also soon found his wife, a fifth-grade teacher who was introduced to him by mutual friends. “It all turned out perfectly,” says Tower. “What I like most about my job is talking to patients. Now I’m going to get a nurse practitioner’s license so I can do that all day, and that really excites me.”

Next up: A former Wall Street banker who is now a Med-Surg Unit nurse. “Nothing has ever humble me like taking care of my dad…”