Ep. 42: A Birth Ritual That’s Totally “Nuts”

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Shanna Micko: Hi. Welcome to Big Fat Positive with Shanna and Laura. On this week’s episode, we have our weekly check-ins. We have a special segment called Today I Learned where Shanna talks about a birthing practice that’s a little bit nuts and we wrap things up with our BFPs and BFNs. Let’s get started.

[Music]

Shanna Micko: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 42.

Laura Birek: Hello.

Shanna Micko: Hi, Laura. Do you want to kick it off with our weekly check-in?

Laura Birek: Sure. So my baby is 10 weeks old this week, which is very exciting.

Shanna Micko: Okay.

Laura Birek: He seems like such a big boy.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, he is getting bigger.

Laura Birek: I know. Even though he’s real small still. He’s still like 10th percentile on the weight chart, but he’s my big boy. So let’s see. The main thing I want to talk about this week is that we are trying to go on weaning mode on the SNOO or I should say past tense. We tried to go on weaning mode on the SNOO.

Shanna Micko: What is weaning mode on the SNOO for people who don’t know?

Laura Birek: Let’s start from the very beginning. For those who don’t know what the SNOO is, it’s like this robot crib that gently rocks your baby side to side all night in the crib and then if your baby cries, it’ll trigger it to play white noise louder and wiggle your baby harder to try to soothe it to go back to sleep. So you don’t have to wake up and soothe your baby. Shanna and I both love our robot cribs. We’re both converts to the SNOO and we had talked on a previous episode about how Shanna you had that big power outage, right?

Shanna Micko: Yes.

Laura Birek: It freaked you out because the SNOO stopped working.

Shanna Micko: It stopped cold.

Laura Birek: But your baby CeCe did fine, right? She didn’t even need the rocking.

Shanna Micko: No, or the white noise. Well, I put white noise on my phone, but she did fine.

Laura Birek: That inspired me to try to put on weaning mode, which is instead of the gentle rocking all night, you just get the white noise and the bed stays still and it will kick up if the baby starts crying. So if your baby starts crying, it will go and it’ll go through the levels of shimming to calm your baby down. But the baseline is still instead of the gentle rocking. Even though they say you should really only do it, they recommend a couple weeks before you want to transition to a real crib, I feel like. Even though that is a ways away for us, because I want to keep him in some form of a bassinet in our room I think until six months, maybe that’ll change as time goes on. But I know that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a year of room sharing, which I think that’s a little too much.

Shanna Micko: Yeah.

Laura Birek: But in England they recommend six months and I think six months I can handle and also just for me, it’s convenient. So I don’t have to go very far to feed him in the middle of the night if he wakes up in the middle of the night.

Shanna Micko: That’s true.

Laura Birek: Anyway, I want to keep him in the room. So I’m not planning on necessarily moving him out of the SNOO anytime soon, but your experience inspired me to look at my logs and I realized that the SNOO had to kick up to a higher level for like a week, at least and even if it did, it would be like once a night, maybe. So I was like, maybe he doesn’t need the full SNOO functionality. So one night this week I told Corey, I’m like, “We’re going to do it. We’re going to go on weaning mode. It’s going to be great,” and we did it and it was great for one night and then the next night I chickened the fuck out.

Shanna Micko: Why if it went great the first night?

Laura Birek: Because I put him down at like seven. Usually, we have bedtime sometime between 6:30 and 7:30 and he’ll sleep until about a 10 or 10:30 dream feed and he was just so fussy in that 7 to 10:00 p.m. span. Usually, he’s out to the point where I have to check our Owlet Monitor that checks his heart rate to make sure he’s alive, because he’s so still. I’ll put him down, he’ll fall asleep and he does not move an inch for like two full hours. Then he’ll start budging a little bit. But on the second night of weaning mode, he was just fussing and squirming and kicking his legs. He’s doing that whale tail thing where he lifts his legs up all the way in the air and slams them down on the mattress.

Shanna Micko: He’s in the swaddle and his legs are just like a mermaid tail like, boom!

Laura Birek: Exactly. The other thing about the SNOO for those who haven’t looked it up is that you get kind of strapped in, you have a swaddle that looks like a little like cocoon and has these little wings that strap into the side so that the baby can’t accidentally turn over and that’s supposed to make it more safe and also it makes it safe when it does the shimming. But also that means that when they like lift their legs straight up in the air, they can’t turn on their side like they probably would naturally.

Shanna Micko: Right.

Laura Birek: I think of it as a whale breaching in the water and then it slams its tail on the ground. He slept, but he was do it fussy so bad and when it came time for the dream feed, he actually woke up instead of sleeping through it like he usually does and that’s when I chickened out. I was like, I want to sleep well tonight.

Shanna Micko: Got to do what you got to do.

Laura Birek: Corey was like, “Weaning isn’t a one day thing. It’s not like a cold turkey thing. It’s weaning,” and I was like, “Yes, great point, husband.”

Shanna Micko: Good point. Good job, dad.

Laura Birek: So we’re back on the regular SNOO and he’s sleeping, but he’s sleeping awesome. He’s 10 weeks old and he wakes up once a night for a feed and that’s it.

Shanna Micko: Nice. That’s fantastic.

Laura Birek: I love it. It makes me so happy. I think we did this together actually, didn’t we? We looked back at our old SNOO logs and it gave us like massive anxiety.

Shanna Micko: Massive anxiety, because all of their fussing and wake up is like red.

Laura Birek: Oh my God.

Shanna Micko: It’s just like, aaahhh.

Laura Birek: You see that you were up like three, four times a night.

Shanna Micko: Or minimum.

Laura Birek: So anyway, we’ll see if I go back to weaning mode soon, but for now we’re back on the regular SNOO.

Shanna Micko: You gave it a whirl.

Laura Birek: We gave it a whirl and I’m pretty well rested, so I’m feeling good about that.

Shanna Micko: Woo-hoo.

Laura Birek: How about you? What’s going on with you this week?

Shanna Micko: My baby’s 14 weeks old and it was an exciting weekend, because my mom came into town and my mother-in-law was here. So we had two moms, two grandmas, two kids and so we’re like they can tag team and Steve and I went out on the town. We went on a date night.

Laura Birek: Ooh, date night.

Shanna Micko: Yes, oh my God. It’s so rare.

Laura Birek: What’d you do? I’m so excited to hear.

Shanna Micko: We just kind of like ditched the house before even deciding what to do, because we’re just like, let’s cut and run. It was like 5:30. I’m like let’s go out early. We’ll hit a happy hour. I won’t be tired. So we left at like 5:30. We’re like, “Put the kids to bed. Bye,” and then in the car, we’re just randomly driving and I’m looking on Yelp trying to find something nearby that isn’t a shitty dive bar, because that seems to be all there is in my neighborhood and I came across this wine and beer garden in West Hills. It’s the Malibu Winery. Have you been to the Malibu Winery in the Malibu Hills?

Laura Birek: I haven’t. I’ve wanted to, but I’ve never had an occasion to go.

Shanna Micko: Oh, it’s wonderful. Well, I think it burned down in the Malibu fires.

Laura Birek: No, really?

Shanna Micko: Yeah, I think. I don’t know. I don’t mean to snicker at that, because it’s not funny whatsoever.

Laura Birek: No, it’s not funny. It’s just sad that I never went and it’s sad for them. Oh, man.

Shanna Micko: You should come to the one out here, because it’s a very similar vibe. It’s wonderful. It’s a lot of seeding then there’s grass and you can bring a blanket and bring a picnic in your own food. But if you don’t, you can order Neapolitan style, woodfired pizza and they have lots of beers on tap and they of course, serve their wines and it was just the most wonderful gem for us to stumble upon for this date night. It was absolutely perfect. There’s like twinkly lights in these big willowy trees hanging down and live music.

Laura Birek: So that’s what I was seeing on Instagram. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

Shanna Micko: Yeah.

Laura Birek: But I was like, that looks nice and I’m jealous.

Shanna Micko: It was so nice and I had one glass of wine and I was like, whoa, I got all tipsy from one glass of wine and then I had another and some pizza and it was just like the perfect amount to make me feel great. It was really fun. It was fun to be out of the house.

Laura Birek: No, that sounds awesome.

Shanna Micko: Anyway, I was going to say how this relates to parenting aside from alone time is it’s like, I’m nervous. Oh my God, how’s the baby going to do? My mom was in charge of putting down the baby and I trust her and everything.

Laura Birek: Oh, yeah. I was curious about bedtime, because it’s tricky to have someone else do bedtime.

Shanna Micko: Exactly. So I was really nervous about that and she got to give her a bottle and do the bath. I was a little worried and I came home and she’s like, “It was fine. She cried through it all. So I think she was a little upset about someone new doing all of these things.”

Laura Birek: No.

Shanna Micko: I went to bed and I was like, oh God, she’s going to be so unsettled just weirded out by her weird bedtime, blah, blah, blah. I went to bed and then woke up at 6:30 in the morning and the baby had not woken up at all night. She slept through the night for the first time.

Laura Birek: What? For the first time?

Shanna Micko: Yes, she rewarded me and my two wine hangover by sleeping all night.

Laura Birek: Wow! Wow!

Shanna Micko: It was amazing. I was like, this is it. We’ve cracked it. Yes, she’s finally there.

Laura Birek: And then?

Shanna Micko: Hasn’t done that again.

Laura Birek: Have I sent you that meme that I found? It’s like, a stock photo of a bunch of scientists looking at test tubes and trying to analyze something and it was like me and my husband, anytime the baby sleeps well we’re trying to replicate our results or whatever.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God.

Laura Birek: It’s so accurate. We’ll have to post that to our Instagram so everyone can commiserate.

Shanna Micko: That was totally me. I was like, “Mom, what did you do? What was the timeline? What exactly happened?” I think she was put on defensive a little bit. I was like, “No, you don’t understand. I need to replicate what you did.”

Laura Birek: Give me your secrets.

Shanna Micko: So I was like, well, obviously I need to give her a bottle before bed. I tried giving her pumped milk before bed. One night, nope. Didn’t do anything. Nothing I did made any difference. She went right back to her old ways, but we had that one glorious night and it was awesome.

Laura Birek: In another world it’s possible: one where she sleeps through the night.

Shanna Micko: I cannot wait and I should mention that she’s not in the SNOO anymore. We cold turkeyed out of it and put her in her crib at a Merlin Sleepsack in my room. So like all of these things, so much was different. I thought for sure it would just be the worst night and it ended up just being wonderful. Who knows?

Laura Birek: You guys moved the crib to your bedroom?

Shanna Micko: Yeah, because same with you, I’m not 100% ready to move her to her own room yet and I want her to be nearby and we have enough room in our bedroom to put the crib and she’s in the Merlin Sleepsack which she knows a big, giant puffy sleep suit. So when she’s in the Merlin and I put her in the SNOO, her arms stick out like a little boy in a big puffy snow suit. The Christmas Carol movie is what it reminds me of that little kid.

Laura Birek: Christmas Story.

Shanna Micko: Christmas Story yeah not Christmas Carol. Not Little Timmy. He never is. Anyways, so her arms stick out and hit the sides of the SNOO, because it’s such a skinny bed. 

So I was like, I’ll just put her in her crib in the Merlin in my room. So I don’t know.

Laura Birek: It’s funny, because literally it had not occurred to me that we could physically move the crib to our room. I don’t know why. We have plenty of room. It’s so funny. It’s like how you’re like no, the crib belongs in the nursery. That’s where cribs go. In my mind I’m like, wait, it’s a piece of furniture that’s portable.

Laura Birek: Exactly.

Shanna Micko: Interesting. It is weird and I have to say, I was just watching Clear Eye and they do an episode where they get ready for a new baby and they have a small house. So they put the crib in the parents’ master bedroom and I had that same reaction. I was like, ugh, that’s a weird place for a crib, but I’m doing it. It’s cool.

Laura Birek: It’s just a bigger bassinet.

Shanna Micko: Yes, exactly.

Laura Birek: I think maybe I’m just resistant to the idea of physically moving it, because it’s kind of heavy.

Shanna Micko: It’s a pain in the ass. It didn’t fit through the door, so we had to break it down and then put it back together.

Laura Birek: Oh God, you’re really not selling this.

Shanna Micko: But one other thing about babies and rooms and cribs, I was looking over my first daughter’s Elle’s baby book from when she was little, because I was curious about her milestones and stuff and I had moved her into her own room at six weeks old and I had written down, she’s sleeping through the night at six weeks old.

Laura Birek: What kind of unicorn is your first daughter?

Shanna Micko: No, but now I’m like, now I understand why it wasn’t so hard to be a parent for the first time back then. I’m like, why is it so hard this time? It’s like, well, I really had my hopes up for a similar experience and that’s just rare.

Laura Birek: Because your baby’s acting like a baby.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, exactly.

Laura Birek: Elle acted like a full grown adult. She’s like, I’m six-week-old. I’m old. I’m just going to go sleep in my own room all the way through the night.

Shanna Micko: That’s so her though. Isn’t that so her personality?

Laura Birek: That really is.

Shanna Micko: It really is.

Laura Birek: I can’t wait till she’s old enough to really appreciate that. Like when she’s 30 and having grown kids and you can be like, hey, guess what you did when you were a baby? She’ll be like, I hate you. My child won’t sleep. Anyway, maybe her child will sleep.

Shanna Micko: Maybe it’ll get the sleepy genes.

Laura Birek: Well, I’m so glad you at least had the one beautiful night of perfect sleep after two wines.

Shanna Micko: It was good. Good. Good. All right. Should we move on to our next segment?

Laura Birek: Yeah, let’s do it after a quick break.

Shanna Micko: Okay.

[Music]

Laura Birek: Our special segment this week is Today I Learned where we talk about the interesting and weird and cool stuff we’ve learned about relating to pregnancy and parenthood and kids and who knows maybe other stuff. Shanna, why don’t you tell us what you learned recently?

Shanna Micko: I recently came across a very interesting birth ritual that can be found in the Huichol Indian tribe. The Huichol Indians are descendants of the Aztecs and they live in the mountains of North Central Mexico and this came up as a meme in Facebook, of course and I’m like, that’s interesting. It comes up because it’s a picture, first of all, that a yarn artist of the tribe did and it depicts the image of how the husbands in this tribe assist in the birth of the child.

Laura Birek: You had me at yarn artist. I’m all about yarn artist.

Shanna Micko: I thought you might like that. Maybe that’s your next hobby: yarn art, Laura. So according to the Huichol tradition, when a woman had her first child, the husband squatted in the rafters of the house above her or in the tree above her if she’s birthing out in the wild directly above her with ropes attached to his scrotum.

Laura Birek: Oh, okay.

Shanna Micko: As the woman went into labor pain, she pulled vigorously on the ropes so that her husband shared in the pain, but ultimately joy of childbirth.

Laura Birek: Wow.

Shanna Micko: That’s an appropriate response. Are you getting this? Are you picturing this? Do I need to clarify anything? Do you think our listeners are going to be confused?

Laura Birek: Let me repeat it back to you and see if I understand. She’s down below giving birth in a lot of pain, her husband is standing in some kind of structure above her with his genitals exposed and tied to a string, which she is holding. So she can inflict pain according to the level of pain she is being inflicted by the birth of her child.

Shanna Micko: Yes.

Laura Birek: Fascinating.

Shanna Micko: So that he can experience part of the pain of the childbirth and so this yarn art depicts this. It’s like a dude in the rafter up above with some strings hanging down, this lady’s got a baby popping out of her vajayjay and there’s like a couple midwives and some trees and branches. Is this something we should be doing in this day and age?

Laura Birek: I did see sort of I guess the modern equivalent of this once. It’s not a one to one, but it’s close, which is apparently there’s some kind of like electric muscle stimulator that can mimic what a contraction feels like. I once saw I think they’re called the Try Guys. I think they have a Buzzfeed channel put this on and saw how long they could last getting contractions and some very gleeful labor and delivery nurse was manipulating it. They came away from it being like, fuck no. We couldn’t go through labor. That was super painful and that doesn’t even include the cervix opening up or any of that stuff.

Shanna Micko: The pushing, the possible tearing.

Laura Birek: I have to say I never experienced contractions or real labor, so I have to recuse myself from this. I got to very calmly walk into my planned C-section. I experienced a lot of pain afterwards obviously from the surgery that I had to go through, but I never got that specific type of pain. I have had an IUD inserted, which hurt like a motherfucker.

Shanna Micko: I believe that, because I had a test done to see if my fallopian tubes were open and it required putting a little catheter up inside my cervix and I almost vomited. I was in so much pain from that.

Laura Birek: It’s unpleasant and I remember being really sort of taken aback by the specific type of pain it was and I remember afterwards telling my doctor, I was like, “Ooh, I did not expect it to be quite that bad,” and I had flinched. I had kind of like recoiled from it in the stir up. So she had said, “I might have to like redo it, because you moved,” and I was like, “You better have to redo it.” Thankfully, she didn’t. But I remember after I was like, “I flinched, because I did not expect it to hurt that bad,” and she said, “That’s just a little glimpse of childbirth.”

Shanna Micko: Oh my God, my doctor said the same thing.

Laura Birek: Then I was like, glad I got that IUD. Thank you very much. 

I will keep that in until it expires, which is exactly what I did.

Shanna Micko: Man, but then your breech baby saved you from it all.

Laura Birek: Yes, I don’t want to cast dispersions on this meme, but did you fact check this?

Shanna Micko: I did. Of course.

Laura Birek: I figured as much.

Shanna Micko: Who knows? The yarn artist is from the tribe. This is from the seventies. This whole thing was mentioned in a scholarly article. Maybe this artist had a sense of humor and this was like her wishful thinking. I don’t really know for sure and so that was going to be my next caveat: who knows.

Laura Birek: But how appropriate that it’s yarn art too. Can I get like clarification? Is it embroidery? Is it tapestry?

Shanna Micko: I don’t know. I don’t think we need to go into the intricacies of yarn art. It looks like a painting. It probably like they just glued some freaking pieces of yarn on a canvas. I don’t know.

Laura Birek: Okay. That’s interesting. I’m going to go with embroidery.

Shanna Micko: You can look up Huichol Yarn Art if you want to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Laura Birek: What we should just do is post it to our Facebook and then our listeners can make up their own minds.

Shanna Micko: Exactly. But anyway, that’s the interesting thing I learned this week and my husband’s very glad that he never had to go through anything like that.

Laura Birek: Bonus.

Shanna Micko: What did you learn?

Laura Birek: I found this article that was actually sent to me by Marilyn, who is our biggest fan and a friend of mine and she’s also our unofficial quality assurance tester for the show. She always tells us if something is wrong or something needs to be updated. So thank you for that Marilyn. She sends me really interesting articles like this one. I found this article that taught me about this thing called uterus didelphys. Have you ever heard of uterus didelphys?

Shanna Micko: Say what?

Laura Birek: Sounds like something’s wrong with your uterus, right? 

Here’s the headline by the way, March 28th, 2019. So this isn’t like a long time ago. This just happened: woman with two wombs gives birth twice nearly a month apart.

Shanna Micko: I read that article. Dang.

Laura Birek: Oh my God.

Shanna Micko: So you got to explain how that’s possible.

Laura Birek: Okay. She’s 20 years old in Bangladesh. She gave birth to a boy in late February.

Shanna Micko: It was premature the boy, right?

Laura Birek: I’m reading CNN and it didn’t say that, but that actually would make more sense because of what’s about to happen and then less than four weeks later, 26 days later, actually to be precise, she came to the hospital complaining of lower abdominal pain and then they did an ultrasound and discovered she was pregnant with full term twins, fucking three babies in her. Then this is where uterus didelphys comes in. Uterus, we all know what that means. Didelphys, die. Meaning two. She has two uteruses.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God.

Laura Birek: So she got pregnant with two separate pregnancies, one boy and one set of twins and she delivered all of them about a month apart and apparently, everyone’s fine.

Shanna Micko: It’s wild that no one knew she was still pregnant with two other babies.

Laura Birek: I understand if you’re not getting ultrasounds, you live in Bangladesh, maybe you don’t have the money to get prenatal care or you don’t live close to a hospital or something and you’re still bloated and swollen after pregnancy. It’s not the first thing you would go to. You have a baby and then 26 days later, you still feel shitty and your stomach’s still distended. You just think, maybe I’m just not bouncing back. Right?

Shanna Micko: Yeah.

Laura Birek: You go to the ER with stomach pains. Your first thought is not, there’s probably twins that’s still in there.

Shanna Micko: Maybe not her first thought, but why aren’t the doctors in on this?

Laura Birek: Because that’s not the doctor’s first thought either. The hole is not a zebra thing. If you’re on the planes or whatever and you hear hooves galloping towards you, it’s probably a horse, not a zebra, because the horse is a lot more common, more likely. So in medicine, you’re not supposed to be looking for the zebras. This is a zebra. This is like a unicorn I feel like.

Shanna Micko: For sure.

Laura Birek: But they delivered the twins, a boy and a girl, by C-section and everyone’s happy and healthy. They didn’t say happy I should clarify.

Shanna Micko: They might be miserable.

Laura Birek: I don’t want to assume anything about their mental health.

Shanna Micko: Yes.

Laura Birek: I can’t even imagine. I was at the mall yesterday. We walked into the Warby Parker. They have an actual brick and mortar Warby Parker store to look at glasses and there was a woman in there with a three-year-old and then probably 10-week-old twins that she was baby wearing one on each hip, which was first of all, very impressive. Second of all, it sent shivers down my spine. I shit you not. I looked over her and I was like, oh God, no. They were both being fussy and I was just like, oh good Lord. Anytime I think my life is hard, I just think about that woman now.

Shanna Micko: She’s obviously not that hard up. She’s going out to the mall with her 10-week-old twins. I had to go to the apple store to get my computer checked out with just my newborn and I was like having hot, panic anxiety sweats in the store, because she was getting hungry and it was one kid and I’m just like, why did I come to the mall? This woman’s just bouncing around the mall. That’s incredible.

Laura Birek: That’s true. Maybe I should track her down and get her to come on the show ask her what her secret is.

Shanna Micko: I would love to know.

Laura Birek: But anyway, so people, if you happen to have weird abdominal pain a month after giving birth, you’re probably not still pregnant. But best to just take a little look to see. Just a little check around under the hood. All right. So shall we move on to our BFPs and BFNs?

Shanna Micko: Let’s do it.

[Music]

Shanna Micko: We wrap up every show with our BFPs and BFNs for the week, our big fat positives and big fat negatives. Laura, what do you have for us?

Laura Birek: So I have a BFP, which is actually like a dual BFP. The first part is that I’m giving a BFP to this place in LA called the Pump Station & Nurtury. I think they have two locations actually one in Santa Monica and one in Hollywood and it’s this great store that’s specifically for women who are pumping and nursing and I think prenatal, but it’s really focused towards supplies for pumping and breastfeeding and they also do I think Mommy and Me classes. I’m giving them a gold star, a BFP, because I went in and I needed a pumping bra. I got like a hand-me-down pumping bra from our friend Jen. It was like one of those like bandeau versions. I could not get it to work. I went on Amazon and got their highest rated pumping bra, just did not fit at all and I was really awkward and the flanges never stayed in. So I finally dragged myself out to the Pump Station and they were so nice and they measured me and they were so accommodating having the baby there naturally. But they have this very nice nursing area in the back, so I arrived and my baby was hungry and so I just went and sat on the couch in the back and nursed while I waited. They actually had a lactation consultant come out and give me a quick talking to. That sounds bad, but she was very nice. No, I was wondering if I had the right flange size and so she gave me some advice and said I was using the right size and gave me some pumping advice all for free, which is nice. I shouldn’t like say that you can go in and just get a bunch of free lactation advice, because they do charge for true breastfeeding consulting. But they were nice enough to just have her stop by and talk to me for like two minutes while I was nursing and then they even had a scale. So I weighed my baby to see how he was doing and then they fitted me for a bra and they have all kinds of different bras there and I got two bras. I got one just plain old nursing bra that’s a real under wire proper bra that fits perfectly and then I got what’s my next part of the BFP, which is the BFP that if you’re not in LA you can actually take part in which is I got a Simple Wishes SuperMom bra. Have you heard of this?

Shanna Micko: No, no idea.

Laura Birek: It’s a bra that is both a nursing and a pumping bra. There’s sort of two snaps. One pulls down if you want to pump. One pulls down if you want to totally nurse, but they’re independent on either side. So you can pump and nurse at the same time, which I ended up having to do the other day because I was pumping and then my baby started getting insanely fussy and we didn’t have a bottle ready and I was like, screw it.

Shanna Micko: Oh, nice.

Laura Birek: Just took one of the flanges off, stuck him on one boob and continued to pump on the other one. So that was great and they’re actually kind of cute. This is the other part. They’re comfortable. They’re not under wire, but they have some lace on them. They have a bunch of different colors and they’re in a very wide variety of sizes. I think they go from 32 D to 40 H. So if you’re on the larger side, it works. But I think a lot of people who are nursing are at least a D and you can get them on Amazon.

Shanna Micko: Ooh.

Laura Birek: They’re between $40 and $60 on Amazon depending on the color and all that stuff. They have one that’s all lace if you want to feel extra sexy and so I actually now have a black one and a cream or tope or something one that I can wear under lighter colored shirts and I’m loving them. I can wear them all day, which is nice. So highly recommend the Simple Wishes SuperMom bra and I’ll put a link to Amazon to this product on bigfatpositivepodcast.com, so you can find it yourself real easy.

Shanna Micko: Nice. That sounds like a good win for you this week.

Laura Birek: It makes life so much easier to just be able to wear the bra all day and then when you have a chance to pump, you can just do it as opposed to taking your bra off, putting the pumping bra on, like that whole rigamarole. I’m loving it. So anyway, that’s my BFP. What do you have for us today?

Shanna Micko: I have a BFP as well.

Laura Birek: Good.

Shanna Micko: That is the carpool lane.

Laura Birek: Oh, yes.

Shanna Micko: This was news to me when I had my first kid. But your kid counts as a person believe it or not. Your baby can be literally one minute old and in the backseat of your car and you can take the carpool lane at least in California. I don’t know about elsewhere.

Laura Birek: That’s a good question. We don’t know about elsewhere, but I had this revelation actually coming to see you this week. We were having other little baby babypalooza, which is what we’ve been calling our little get together with your baby, my baby and our friend Jenny’s baby and I walk in and I was like, “Guys, I used the carpooling to get here,” and they were both like, “Yeah, yeah.”

Shanna Micko: We’re both mothers of two children, so we’re well aware of it by now.

Laura Birek: Like you don’t understand. Then I told Corey about it, because Corey actually drives that same stretch every day to work and it gets really backed up. So he was very jealous and I was like, “Just take the baby to work with you every day. It’ll be fine.”

Shanna Micko: It’s really nice for us too, because Steve and I work together and we live pretty far from where we work and our first daughter goes to preschool on the campus of where we work. There’s a preschool there. So even if Steve is homesick or something, I can still cruise to work and beat all the traffic in the carpool lane, because I’ve got my little three-year-old in the backseat and now I’ve got another bonus. So when I’m going out to babypalooza or play dates or wherever I’m going, I’m just like, bye. See you suckers. I do get really nervous that the cops aren’t going to see that I have a car seat and going to pull me over. Like my license was expired for like a month or something. Before I was able to get an appointment to renew it and I was terrified to drive in the carpooling, I was like, I feel like I’m a moving target. They’re going to think I don’t have anyone in the carpool and they’re going to pull me over and find out I don’t have my license and so I wouldn’t do it then. But all other times it was like, bye.

Laura Birek: You just reminded me one that I have my little renewal sticker sitting on the desk in my massive to-do pile, so I need to do that today.

Shanna Micko: Oh, yeah.

Laura Birek: Put it on my car and then the other thing is I’ve been thinking about getting some type of baby on board sign to try to stop that, because it would defeat the purpose of the carpooling if you have to get pulled over and explain yourself.

Shanna Micko: Exactly. That would add time and a friend of mine, we were talking about this and he is like, “I take this carpooling all the time, take my kids to school and I did get pulled over by the cops one time, because she didn’t think I had anyone in the car with me and she pulled me over and saw. I’m so sorry. I see you have your children, so you’re totally fine. But you did cross the double yellow line. So I’m still going to give you a ticket.” So I was like, okay, we still have to follow the rules of the carpool lane.

Laura Birek: What? You got to follow the rules of the road. Drive safely everyone. But yeah, I think if listeners have any non-obnoxious baby on board signs, because I just don’t want to have that yellow thing that says, “Baby on board.” So if anyone has any better options for me, I would love to hear. Go to bigfatpositivepodcast.com or go to our socials at BFP Podcast and let me know, because I want to let the world know that there’s baby in there. So I don’t get pulled over, but I also don’t want one of those kind of dorky old fashioned baby on board signs.

Shanna Micko: Just make one out of yarn art.

Laura Birek: Good call. On that note, I think we should wrap it up.

Shanna Micko: We should. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. 

If you have anything you want to share with us BFPs, BFNs, anything interesting you’ve learned lately, you know we want to know and we want to hear from you. So please reach out. Laura, where can they find us again?

Laura Birek: Bigfatpositivepodcast.com. We are also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at BFP Podcast and we have a Facebook community group. So join there and join in the conversation.

Shanna Micko: Big Fat Positive is produced by Shanna Micko, Laura Birek and Steve Yager.

Laura Birek: See you next time.

Shanna Micko: Bye.

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