Carle's All About Baby Classes Return to Champaign-Urbana

By Kelly Youngblood

Good news for local mothers-to-be: As of March 2026, Carle Health’s All About Baby program has returned to the Champaign-Urbana area, offering a full lineup of educational lessons, including labor and delivery, maternal mental health, breastfeeding, and caring for your newborn.

Ashley Polnitz, RN and supervisor of Healthy Beginnings at Carle Health Community Health Initiatives, said the series includes much of the same information as before with an addition of a class on maternal mental health. The most notable change is to the childbirth preparedness education class.

“It was a three-part series with labor support techniques but is now more focused on identification and early signs of labor and what it looks like to have your baby at the Carle Foundation Hospital facility,” Polnitz said.

Led by staff at Carle Health Community Health Initiatives, All About Baby is the Carle Health prenatal and family education program open to both Carle and non-Carle patients.

The original classes were discontinued in 2023, but a group of nurses within the Carle Health Community Health Initiatives began teaching community education classes to those participating in their home visiting services in 2019. Those classes were held in person for those families until the pandemic but were later moved to a virtual platform to promote safety and better accommodate needs to those families.

With an understanding of how this information could be useful to families community-wide, Polnitz said the CHI team made all of their virtual classes available to all obstetric patients back in 2025.

“Toward the end of that year, the team decided to launch both in-person and virtual options and really push the information out on a larger scale,” she said.

Those interested can find class descriptions and registration information on the All About Baby website. Information may also be provided by your prenatal care team.