It’s nice to meet you! My name is Alyssa, and I am an Occupational Therapist (OT) in Monmouth County, NJ. I have worked in numerous hospitals across New Jersey as an acute care OT. My son, Noah, was born 3 weeks premature in April 2025 and required a short NICU stay after he was born. This experience was extremely overwhelming for me as a new mom. I found myself trying to navigate breastfeeding and pumping challenges, physically healing from Noah’s birth, dealing with intense hormone shifts, and trying to absorb all of the information being thrown my way by doctors, nurses, and family members. Eventually, we were discharged home and I was once again overwhelmed by all of the differing opinions both by my family and online.

However, through communicating in various mom groups and speaking with moms in my personal life, I began to feel more confident in my abilities as a mom. I combined my foundational OT knowledge of pediatrics and maternal health with evidence-based research to make the most informed decisions that I could for my baby. The more I learned, the more I wanted to share my postpartum knowledge with other new moms. That’s when I decided to utilize my OT degree and shift my focus from acute care to “the 4th trimester.”

My mission at Nest & Nurture OT is to provide nurturing, judgement-free, evidence-based, and skilled OT services for new parents and their babies to overcome challenges with feeding, the home environment, tongue/lip/cheek ties, torticollis, plagiocephaly, delayed milestones, and postpartum health. This is done through identifying challenges in the family screening, forming goals in the evaluation, and creating specialized intervention plans to meet the dyad’s specific needs. I aim to use my own postpartum experience when communicating with families throughout the entire process to ensure a positive and holistic learning environment for everyone.