Anita Creamer: A chance for moms to get some pampering

The break room at the North Sacramento Family Resource Center on Del Paso Boulevard is doing double duty this morning.

Kelly Escay, a Mary Kay consultant, has arrayed peach-scented hand products on a table near the two refrigerators and the microwave oven. Florence Claypoole, a massage therapist who's also volunteering her time, has set up her massage chair in a corner.

It's spa day for a dozen Birth and Beyond participants. In a show of festivity, the local Junior League, which sponsors this annual Mother's Day event at a handful of the county's eight family resource center sites, calls it "Spring Fling."

"We want to give the women the chance to focus on themselves," says the league's Jennifer Hall. "We want them just to enjoy life a little."

For a while, the helpers outnumber the clients. An eager group of Junior League volunteers – some in jeans, some dressed for work and accessorized heavily with Chanel – gathers in the center. So do family resource employees and AmeriCorps volunteers.

But where are the participants?

The Birth and Beyond program, created in 1999, includes parenting classes, in-home visits and other free services for parents who live in some of the county's neediest neighborhoods. The program serves about 5,000 families each year.

Instead of the usual spa environment – soft lighting, for example, and a soundtrack that varies from Enya to raindrops to George Winston – the center is fluorescent-lit and, well, utilitarian.

No matter. The ladies have been promised a spa day, with massages and manicures and gift bags, and here they come.

Tanaya Brown, seven months pregnant with her second child, walks in, and the volunteers descend. Brown, 20, looks a bit overwhelmed as she settles in for a massage with Claypoole.

"You are all baby, girl," says Escay, watching. "It's like there's a basketball in there."

Brown giggles, then shyly says she's never had a massage before.

"Do you find you have a lot of tension in your neck and shoulders?" Claypoole asks.

"Especially carrying my daughter around all day," Brown says, nodding.

Now Escay is instructing two more participants – Patricia Oliver, 27, and Melody Roop, 28 – on how to rub a pastel-colored cream into their hands.

"This is an exfoliator," she advises them.

In a big room down the hallway, two Junior League volunteers named Wendy Rucker and Michelle Wells are arranging envelopes of beads around a table for a jewelry- making project.

Oh, goody. Crafts.

"The women will do the crafts and take something home for themselves," says Hall.

But Oliver – her hands newly exfoliated and hydrated – doesn't want to make jewelry, and she quietly says so.

"I'll help her with her nails," says Julie Bugatto, current Junior League president, whose first child is due in a few weeks. ("I realize how lucky I am," she had said earlier. "If we didn't have access to services! So this is great.")

Bugatto paints Oliver's short nails an assertive shade of pink. And Wells is instructing Roop on how to thread beads onto wire.

"Do you get it?" she asks.

"Yes," says Roop, who moved to Sacramento from Kentucky in 2007. Her husband, an accountant, is home this morning with their 6-week-old daughter.

"So there's these little holes," says Wells. "It's like threading a needle."

And so it goes, as more women arrive for their spa time.

"Feel my hands!" says Teanna Scott, 26, who brought her adorable 15-month-old daughter, Ciana, with her this morning.

Scott has just completed the hand treatment, and she's thrilled.

"My hands were all ashy when I came in, and now feel how soft," she says.

Very soft.

"I've done the hand massage and the neck massage, and I've made three pairs of earrings," says Tanaya Brown. "This is fun."

About the writer:

• Anita Creamer's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in Scene. Reach her at (916) 321-1136 or acreamer@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/creamer.