GENIE WITH A BOT TLE
When Hollywood’s biggest stars can’t cope with their fussy little newborns, Nanny Connie is there to help
W HEN it comes to being cowed by tiny, screaming, inscrutable newborns, celebrities — it turns out — are just like us.
That’s what Connie Simpson, a k a Nanny Connie, has learned from her time as Hollywood’s most in-demand baby nurse. In her new book “The Nanny Connie Way: Secrets to Mastering the First Four Months of Parenthood,” Simpson doles out advice and dishes about unglamorous postpartum life with her A-list clients, who include Jessica Alba and Cash Warren, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake, and the Clooneys — to name a few.
When celebrities come home from the hospital with their bundles of joy, they’re just as freaked out as everyone else, Simpson, 57, says. “They’re all just the new parents on the block,” she tells The Post. “They have the regular issues with boobs expanding, [baby] throw-up on them and sleepless nights. And [they say,] ‘How do you [deal with] sleep deprivation?’ They want to know how to make it through.”
Simpson is ready with answers to all sorts of questions. Over the course of her 30-year career, she estimates she’s worked with some 270 families. She arrives as soon as they return from the hospital and stays anywhere from six weeks to six months, during which she is on call 24-7, calming crying infants in the middle of the night if needed. She has a degree in early childhood education, Montessori training and firsthand experience from raising her own daughter, now 35.
Her first baby-nursing gigs were for locals in her hometown of Mobile, Ala., but her glowing word-of-mouth reviews soon took her all over the country, to nurture new additions from CEOs, celebrities and socialites. Today, she regularly travels to Los Angeles and Manhattan with a bag full of tricks and a habit of comforting willowy screen sirens with plates of her buttery soul food.
Simpson says the top issue that plagues new parents is anxiety.
“New parents suffer from tunnel vision,” Simpson says. “They get worried that they’re doing things wrong, when they should be relaxing.”
Pregnant Jessica Biel, for instance, wanted everything to be perfect for the arrival of her first child in 2015 with boy-bander Justin Timberlake. She filled her Hollywood Hills, Calif., home with mountains of organic, nontoxic baby items in preparation for the infant’s arrival, and planned to have an unmedicated childbirth. But Biel ended up having a C-section and, under Simpson’s tutelage, learned to be more flexible. Simpson’s cooking helped calm her down too. “The diet was totally out the window,” Simpson says of the homemade grits and pound cake Biel devoured. Even experienced parents, such as Matt Damon and wife Luciana Barroso, have plenty to learn. When Simpson arrived to help out after the birth of their second child, Gia, in 2008, the nanny was shocked to hear of the lengths the couple had gone through to put their older, then-2-year-old daughter to bed when she was a tiny babe. “They told me how the room would be pitch black, how they would play a song over and over and over again, and how they had worn a path from walking back and forth with their new bundle,” she says.
Simpson intervened with a “Hell nah, dawg,” and her patented sleep ritual for newborns: a warm bath, some soft music, a quick massage for the little one and a bottle of breast milk. “I placed Gia into her bassinet and just like that, she was off having a party with the sandman,” Simpson says. “Matt and Lucy looked at me like I was Houdini.”
Her soothing abilities aren’t limited to newborns; she also works magic with mothers.
Brooke Shields, who famously suffered from postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter Rowan, hired Simpson to help out with her second girl, Grier. To everyone’s relief, Shields didn’t struggle with any psychological issues the second time around, but she did have trouble breastfeeding. Simpson came to the rescue, pouring the actress pint after pint of nonalcoholic dark beer — her secret for enhancing milk production — and turning Shields’ master bath into a “pumping oasis.”
“We had snacks, water, a cozy chair . . . There was so much laughter, joy and relaxation in that bathroom,” she says. “We bonded over beer and boobs!”