Ep. 48: Losing Sleep: Postpartum Insomnia and Rock Concerts

[Music]

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 our special segment called Today I Learned where the Pope meets Aunt Flo and we wrap things up with our big fat positives and big fat negatives. Let’s get to it.

[Music]

Shanna Micko: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. Hi, Laura.

Laura Birek: Hi, Shanna.

Shanna Micko: Hi. Let’s start with our weekly check-ins. How old is your baby and what is going on?

Laura Birek: My baby is 16 weeks old and there’s a bunch of stuff going on this week.

Shanna Micko: Tell me it all.

Laura Birek: So the first thing is he rolled over from back to front finally.

Shanna Micko: Big boy.

Laura Birek: That was exciting. It’s still very labored. It’s not a very easy little, whoop! I’m over. It takes up a good couple minutes to really get all the way over, but he does it independently. So it’s good.

Shanna Micko: That’s so cute.

Laura Birek: That was really exciting and very cute and he’s happy. He loves tummy time. So I think he likes being able to get himself into tummy time.

Shanna Micko: Hold up. That sounds rare to me. I feel like most babies hate tummy time. Your guy likes it?

Laura Birek: Yes, I don’t know what I did. He did not like it at the very beginning. He found it frustrating, but at some point he got even better head control and gosh, he just has been loving it for the past couple months. We put him in tummy time he laughs.

Shanna Micko: The past couple months? He’s only three months old. This is most of his life here. I’m impressed.

Laura Birek: That’s true. I guess it was about the first month he hated it and then when he was kind of able to get a little bit more of his chest up, I’m giving him all the credit when we deserve some credit, which is I got him a cute little mirror. Did we talk about this? 

It’s like a little foldable mirror that is shatterproof. It’s a plastic mirror and it has these little toys. There’s a little bumblebee and a little black and white dragon fly. It has a little crinkly paper and a little ball that you can swipe at that makes a noise.

Shanna Micko: Cool.

Laura Birek: So we got the mirror. Maybe he’s a narcissist. He just wants to look at himself in the mirror.

Shanna Micko: I need one of those. CeCe hates tummy time still.

Laura Birek: Really?

Shanna Micko: Yes, she’s much older. It’s crazy. We know her. She screams anyway, but wow. I need to get one.

Laura Birek: We’ll post the link. I got it on Amazon. You can be assured that anything I talk about you can get on Amazon. I don’t know what I would do without Amazon Prime, but I’ll post the link on bigfatpositivepodcast.com, because it’s great. It’s a really cute little mirror and I can’t tell you the number of times it’s fallen on his head and he doesn’t even care. It’s really lightweight. Anyway, so that’s very exciting and fun. The downside is that we’ve been going through this four-month sleep regression. I talked about it last week and my Mommy and Me teacher calls it the cognitive leap. I discussed that too. She likes to reframe it and it’s been rough. It’s been a lot of waking up at night, but I think maybe we’re getting out of it. It’s a little soon to tell, but it’s been about seven days and seven to eight days I want to say of it being really bad and it seems like it might be easing up. He’s not waking up every 45 minutes like he was the first day of this freaking cognitive leap or whatever you want to call it.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God.

Laura Birek: I think I’m eternally optimistic. Every night I put the baby down and I’m like, maybe tonight’s the night.

Shanna Micko: I can relate. My hope renews every single day. It’s wild.

Laura Birek: It is crazy. I really do and I think maybe part of it is that the first part of his sleep is always the best. I put him down around 6:30 or 7 and he’s out and I’m like, wow, he’s sleeping so great. Maybe tonight’s the night. Always proven wrong. But anyway, so that’s going on. I’m just going to go like rapid fire here. There’s another bad thing.

Shanna Micko: Oh, no.

Laura Birek: Postpartum hair loss has hit me. It has hit me hard.

Shanna Micko: It hit you, so you didn’t avoid it. Do you have a chicken head like me?

Laura Birek: I have bangs, which I think is helping me avoid the massive baby hair chicken head like you talked about a couple weeks ago. The bangs I think really mask the level of the hair loss, but what I’m noticing is the part in the middle of my head and the part at my bang, there’s a gap. You know what I mean?

Shanna Micko: Oh God.

Laura Birek: It’s so disturbing when you just brush your hair or brush your hand through your hair even and you just come out with clumps. It’s so gross. When I do my laundry, there are clumps of my hair all balled up. You know how that happens?

Shanna Micko: Yes.

Laura Birek: My hair is red. For anyone who hasn’t seen a picture of me on Instagram, I dye my hair red. So it’s like very visible on most anything and I multiple times thought it was a weird hairy spider.

Shanna Micko: No.

Laura Birek: Then thankfully realized it was just my postpartum hair loss. It hit me right at four months basically postpartum. So I think that sounds pretty typical. I think that’s when it hit you about a month ago you were talking about that.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, maybe a little early for me. My first time around the sun with this whole thing I feel like it was around four months and it kind of got me earlier. I feel like it’s getting better for me now and those little fuzzy baby hairs have grown out a bit and I did get a haircut and I think some people on Instagram have noticed that I did get my haircut finally, so that helps too.

Laura Birek: That’s good.

Shanna Micko: I’m not noticing them as much. Thank you.

Laura Birek: I’m kind of hesitant to get my haircut, because I go for cut and color and now I’m like, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Shanna Micko: Are you going to switch it up?

Laura Birek: I don’t know. I like my long hair a lot and I’ve had this haircut for a really long time, but I also like being able to put my hair up and so I don’t want to do it too short so I can’t put it up.

Shanna Micko: Keep us posted.

Laura Birek: I will. Okay. I’m going to end on a good note, which is I went to a concert.

Shanna Micko: What?

Laura Birek: Yeah.

Shanna Micko: Not for children, like for adults?

Laura Birek: Downright for adults. I went to a concert with my friend Marilyn: fan of the show, our unofficial QA tester, who always lets me know at 3 a.m. if something went wrong with the episode so I can fix it.

Shanna Micko: She’s the best.

Laura Birek: Marilyn is the best. It was either right after or right before I gave birth, I saw that there were tickets going on sale for Hot Chip. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Hot Chip. They’re a British, like an indie dance band. They’re sort of like LCD Soundsystem I guess. I call it electronic, but they use real instruments.

Shanna Micko: That sounds fun. I have heard of them, but I don’t really know their music.

Laura Birek: I really enjoy them and they never tour. It’s been forever since they toured and Marilyn and I have been lamenting it, because we’re both really big fans. Through the fog of mom brain I’m remembering I was super pregnant and I was sitting at my desk and I saw that there was tickets on sale and there was a presale and I was like, ooh, I’m going to be four months postpartum at this point. I’m like, fuck it. We’re going to get those tickets. We’re just going to do it.

Shanna Micko: Good.

Laura Birek: I managed to snag tickets. It was at the El Rey, which is a really small theater. So I was stoked to go, but it was weird. It was the first time I’ve been out without Corey, because the other times we’ve been out to dinner, my mom has watched the baby. But it was like girl’s night and we took a lift down and we had dinner at a bar restaurant that was super hip and delicious and had a couple drinks and then we went to the concert and Shanna, the concert started at 10 o’clock at night.

Shanna Micko: Go fuck yourself up, Chip.

Laura Birek: But here’s the best part. They only played for an hour.

Shanna Micko: Okay. Good. Other question, did you have to stand?

Laura Birek: We did have to stand.

Shanna Micko: This sounds like my nightmare. Not going to lie.

Laura Birek: I wore very comfortable shoes. I think Marilyn was like, what are you going to wear? I’m like, I’m not dressing cute.

Shanna Micko: You’re like Nike running shoes.

Laura Birek: Yeah, pretty much. I’m like, they’re just lucky that I don’t have spit up on my outfit I think. Not 100% sure. It’s dark. Who cares? I wasn’t there to pick up guys. I was there to dance to some music and it was actually fun and I’ve never been so happy for a short set. I didn’t go check, but I bet there were people online complaining they only came to LA once every five years and then they only played an hour. But I was like, thank God.

Shanna Micko: Serving the moms in the city.

Laura Birek: But I have to say it was really cathartic to get out and dance. I’m not a huge dancer, but I do my white lady shoulder bump in.

Shanna Micko: Move that body.

Laura Birek: Yeah, it was really fun.

Shanna Micko: That sounds fun.

Laura Birek: Oh God, he slept so terribly. It was so bad that night. I think I was up till two, because I got home at like midnight and then I tried to dream feed. 

He woke up and then he had to have his diaper change. Anyway, I don’t remember the exact order of operations, but all I remember is I was up till two and then he woke up again at four and I was really paying for it the next day, but I was still glad I went.

Shanna Micko: The bottom line is still good.

Laura Birek: That is my rapid fire all the things happening this week. Shanna, did you have an eventful week too?

Shanna Micko: I did. First of all, my baby is 20 weeks old.

Laura Birek: It’s so big.

Shanna Micko: It is very big.

Laura Birek: I think say that every week. Every week I’m like, oh my God, she’s so big.

Shanna Micko: I know.

Laura Birek: It’s true.

Shanna Micko: She’s getting bigger. It was an eventful week, because I started work. My maternity leave ended and I had my first week back at work.

Laura Birek: Oh my God.

Shanna Micko: It was made much better by the fact that I’m now allowed to work from home. So that’s awesome.

Laura Birek: Yes, as discussed in the last episode.

Shanna Micko: But I did go in the first day to say hi and work a full day and reconnect with my team and everything. So Steve took the day off and watched CeCe and I went into the office and it was good. It was great, but I have to say I think that my peppy energy is blind the fact that I am fucking exhausted. I am riddled with anxiety just about everything going on in my life and my fear about not being able to manage everything and it’s manifesting in insomnia.

Laura Birek: Come on. I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at your insomnia, because really that’s the last thing any of us need right now. We should be able to sleep at any point.

Shanna Micko: Right. You think I would just be able to crash. She hasn’t been sleeping great. The four-month sleep regression is over, but she’s still waking up every three hours or so just seeming very unhappy and I’m trying to figure all of that out. But on Monday night, she actually slept pretty well and I was up for literally three straight hours.

Laura Birek: No.

Shanna Micko: She was sleeping like a log and I was in bed going crazy. I wrote Steve an email, because he’s sleeping away and I’m just like, “I don’t think I can handle this. What have I done? Oh my God. I’ve been awake for three fucking hours. I’ve opened the app called Headspace, which is supposed to calm you down. I downloaded it, opened it, listened to a meditation called fallback to sleep and I counted backwards from 10,000.”

Laura Birek: What? The whole way?

Shanna Micko: I didn’t make it all the way.

Laura Birek: Okay. Jesus.

Shanna Micko: But I made it a lot farther than I thought. I made it a few hundred.

Laura Birek: Did it end before you gave up or before you fell asleep?

Shanna Micko: Before I gave up.

Laura Birek: Oh, man.

Shanna Micko: I try really hard to put myself back to sleep before I resort to looking at my phone and screens and stuff. 

So I probably worked on deep breaths and counting and stuff for hours, like two hours probably and finally I took out my phone and typed out this email. I’m like, “What am I doing? I don’t think I can handle this. We’ve got to figure out her sleep. We’ve got to get her to sleep through the night and blah, blah, blah.” I don’t even know how I eventually fell asleep and it was terrible after that. It was so light. When you sleep in a light sleep, it doesn’t even feel like real sleep. It just feels like, I don’t know why I was just going to say a picnic, but it’s not a picnic. This is an example of how my sleep deprived brain is firing right now. What am I even doing? I hope no one I work with is listening to this podcast and knows what a delirious mess I am. I’m really still very responsible with my work during the day, but I’m real tired. Like I said last week, it’s a real busy week for us. This time of year is just very busy at work and so I jumped right in the deep end with work and also taking care of the baby. I just got to push through. I keep saying in a couple weeks it’ll slow down.

Laura Birek: Yeah.

Shanna Micko: I can do this. I’m going to work on getting her to sleep through the night and night wean that’s on my agenda and I will keep you all updated. We’ll see how it goes.

Laura Birek: Wow. That’s a lot and I think during pregnancy I really had a lot of anxiety insomnia. People might remember that at the beginning of my pregnancy, a good friend of mine was killed and it was a really stressful time and so on top of all the pregnancy stuff, I was dealing with grief and worrying about my friend who lost her husband and all this stuff. I had terrible insomnia around that time and the only thing that was working for me and I think it might have been one of my BFPs was a podcast called Sleep With Me. Did I mention this?

Shanna Micko: That does sound familiar.

Laura Birek: It’s a guy who literally tells boring meandering stories that are interesting enough that your mind doesn’t wander off to whatever you’re worried about, but not nearly engaging enough to make you stay up to find out what happens next and he does stuff like he’ll do recaps of The Good Place. He’ll do episode recaps, but really weird. So the recaps will be like, what are the names of the characters?

Shanna Micko: Eleanor, Michael.

Laura Birek: “So Michael is wearing a very interesting bow tie. I think it’s gingham. It’s blue and gray.” But of course he’s talking half asleep. He’s like, “It’s blue and gray and there’s something on the wall. It says this and Eleanor, that was a funny joke about existentialism.” He kind of gets what’s going on, but it’s not actually a recap. I’m telling you that saved my sleep when I was going through that insomnia.

Shanna Micko: Awesome. I will have to try that. That sounds perfect.

Laura Birek: Are you okay with having headphones in though? Are you worried about…

Shanna Micko: I hate it.

Laura Birek: Okay. But I mean about the baby, because I’ve thought I shouldn’t do that because then I won’t hear the baby, but maybe I will.

Shanna Micko: No, I sleep with earplugs. So I have always been able to hear the kids through those and also because I have the monitor and that monitor is loud. That’s part of the anxiety too is it’s like so quiet in the house and especially with my earplugs and then all of a sudden I just heard that reverberate.

Laura Birek: It all goes back to CeCe, the screecher.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, so that will jolt me out of even the deepest sleep just like, what’s going on? Emergency! It’s usually never an emergency, but just that repetition of being suddenly awoken is very scary and then when things are calm and I’m in an anxious state, I will anticipate that. It’s like, okay, when is the wake up going to come? When is it coming? When is it coming? I’ll sit and anticipate.

Laura Birek: I get that too. I have to say that I have been waking up right before my baby wakes up, because it’s like I’ve been trained. But everything’s totally up in the air right now with this regression/cognitive leap. But I was noticing that my baby would sort of just generally wake up once a night after the dream feedback before this nightmare. Yeah, there were a couple nights where I would wake up and I’d be like, what? The baby’s still asleep. I should go back to sleep and then I’m like, but it’s almost time for him to wake up and then I’m sitting there and then next thing I know I should really go back to sleep. Maybe he won’t wake up and then just when I finally convince myself to really try to go back to sleep, I hear like, eh.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God, that is so my life right now. I don’t think I’ve slept more than three straight hours in a while and it’s starting to take a toll on my personality and my life.

Laura Birek: They use sleep deprivation in Guantanamo as a torture or alternative interrogation technique. I think I heard that.

Shanna Micko: That sounds right. It does feel like torture to not get a long stretch.

Laura Birek: I think it is a known torture method or so I’ve been told and it feels like it.

Shanna Micko: All the more mad respect you have to have for parents.

Laura Birek: Right.

Shanna Micko: Anyway, that is my crazy check-in for the week. Everyone, send me good vibes for better sleep. I could use them and I will update you next week with how it’s all going.

Laura Birek: So should we take a break and hear from our sponsors and then come back and do our special segment?

Shanna Micko: I think we should.

[Music]

Laura Birek: This week’s special segment is Today I Learned where we talk about the interesting things we’ve learned recently related to pregnancy parenting, or I don’t know, could be something else. Shanna, you want to tell us what you learned?

Shanna Micko: I learned and this is relevant to me because a), I take birth control pills and b), I’ve never done this before, but I want to start doing this where I skip the placebo pills so I can skip having a period and just roll into the next cycle and not have a period and I mentioned this to my mom and she’s like, “Is that okay? Is that safe?” I’m like, “Yeah, I think it’s safe.” So I came across this article and the title is birth control break has no health benefit. It was introduced to please the Pope medical experts say.

Laura Birek: What does he know about women’s bodies?

Shanna Micko: Exactly. So I was like, well, okay. This is very relevant to me and I’m very curious what the Pope has to do with birth control, because he’s the head of a church that doesn’t even allow birth control.

Laura Birek: Good point.

Shanna Micko: So here is the story and I’m quoting from an article from Apple News. John Rock, the gynecologist who helped develop the birth control pill and a devout Catholic created the break and I’m meaning the week of placebo pills to kind of get you off the hormones and mimic your own cycle and give you the period. He created the break, because he hoped the Pope would approve it. He thought that if it imitated the natural cycle, then the Pope would accept it, which of course he didn’t.

Laura Birek: That’s optimistic.

Shanna Micko: He didn’t. His campaign failed and apparently he just stopped being a Catholic, which he had been for his entire life.

Laura Birek: Wow. That’s a man dedicated to women’s health. I’m very impressed by that.

Shanna Micko: Me too. I thought that was really cool. There’s some debate about this as there is everything and I haven’t had time to research every single avenue of this topic, because that’s not my job, but some sources say that this is a way to assure women that they were not pregnant. So I guess if women get their period, then they know they’re not pregnant. I like this Pope story, because I think it’s wacky and crazy and just makes so much sense that even though this John Rock is clearly a women’s health advocate, two men here, John Rock and the Pope are the ones involved in this thing that has to do with women’s bodies.

Laura Birek: Of course. Why would a woman be involved in figuring out what to do with a woman’s body, Shanna?

Shanna Micko: Because she’s home sweeping the kitchen, especially back in this era.

Laura Birek: We don’t really know what’s good for us.

Shanna Micko: No. No. No. No.

Laura Birek: So I have to say on this topic I’ve done a ton of research, because I was on Depo-Provera for 10 years. I started in college.

Shanna Micko: That’s the shot?

Laura Birek: That’s the every three month shot, which I think I took it longer than you should. But at the time when I was in college in the early two thousands, it was one of the only long-term options. So there was the copper IUD, there was hormonal birth control pills and then there was Depo. I really don’t think there was another option. I tried to take birth control pills. I could not remember to take them and I knew that was the problem, because you have to take them every day basically at the same time. So I opted for this Depo shot and I have to say a lot of people have had bad experiences and I think everyone needs to make their own decision, but I loved it and part of the reason I loved it was that I basically did not get a period for 10 years.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God, that’s my dream. I’m dedicated to not having periods again.

Laura Birek: Well, people are always like, oh my God, doesn’t that freak you out? I have to say this is why I discovered how to buy really cheap pregnancy tests and just rely on taking them because I’m like, you know what? That’s the answer. If I don’t have my period, I can just take a cheap pregnancy test and then I can just be reassured. But yeah, it did not bother me at all and I thought, you know what? This is what being a man is like.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God, 100%.

Laura Birek: The thing about depo is that it’s very steady hormones. The first I think it’s high at the very beginning, but the depo is it means that it was released slowly. So you don’t get the ups and downs of your cycle. I also didn’t have PMS. People always called me very even keeled and I think some of that was that I basically didn’t have to have a cycle for 10 years and I thought it was awesome. I never had to worry about getting my period at an awkward time. I was young. This is from like 18 to 28 ish. So that worked out great for me and then they started putting black box warnings on it that it’ll with your bone density, so I stopped.

Shanna Micko: No. God, there’s just a downfall to everything.

Laura Birek: But I did a ton of research and as far as anyone can tell, it’s not just not bad for you to not have your periods for a while. It might actually be beneficial. It might actually protect you from certain cancers including I think breast cancer.

Shanna Micko: Excellent. This article does talk about how there’s just no health risk to skipping your period and for me, the main reason I don’t want to have a period is I do have bad PMS and I have the emotional ups and downs and I hate it. I always felt like I’m taking two steps forward and then PMS hits and boom! I take a step back. In terms of motivation how I feel about myself and going through that as a mom with Elle, that’s hard. It’s hard to be a mom and go through those cycles of emotions and I just don’t want to do that anymore. I told my doctor that and he was totally fine with it and he told me that he felt the best option was birth control pills with skipping the placebos. He didn’t even mention those other options. So I guess that’s what I’ll end up doing. I’m on the mini pill now, because that’s the one you have to take while you breastfeed. So this article gave me hope, you just gave me hope and I’m very excited for my period free future.

Laura Birek: I will say I think I did NuvaRing for a while and it didn’t really work for me, because I realized I had estrogen in it and I don’t do well with estrogen. This is going to sound so bonkers, but I have really bad jaw pain, like TMJ pain. I’ve had it since I was a teenager and it got better in college and then it got worse in my late twenties and I couldn’t figure out why my jaw pain suddenly came back full force. I started Googling and I discovered that 80% of people who complain of jaw pain, TMJ pain, are women.

Shanna Micko: What?

Laura Birek: So they think there’s an estrogen connection and they did something in rats where rats given estrogen had increased jaw pain. I have no idea how you measure that in a rat. 

But that was enough for me to be like, you know what? I need to get off this estrogen. Plus estrogen containing birth control is more risky. The older you get into your thirties it has higher risk of blood clots. So then I eventually got a Mirena, which is the little plastic IUD that very low hormones, but it has hormones that release it and I love that. That pretty much stopped my periods too.

Shanna Micko: Interesting.

Laura Birek: I got pregnant very quickly after taking it out.

Shanna Micko: Good. That’s awesome. I’m so happy and grateful that there are options for us.

Laura Birek: So many options now. It’s really exploded in the last couple years, which is great. Maybe like five years, because sometimes you have to try out a bunch of different things before you figure out what works for you. But I say, go for it.

Shanna Micko: Thank you. I’m going to. What about you? What have you learned recently that you want to share with us?

Laura Birek: So I read an article on NPR and the title was I went through my pregnancy with strangers. It was the best decision I could have made.

Shanna Micko: What? I can’t even think about what this means.

Laura Birek: I know. I was wondering. I was like, what does this mean I went through it with strangers? I was like, is she a single mom? What happened? So it’s actually about this woman who got pregnant right after she moved from San Francisco to Chicago and didn’t have any friends around and didn’t have a support group and she went to a midwifery center that did something called group prenatal care. They call them CenteringPregnancy Groups. That’s all one word, CenteringPregnancy, with the P in pregnancy capitalized. I think it might be trademarked. But it’s a new method of prenatal care where you’re in a group of 7 to 10 people and you all show up to your prenatal appointments at the same time once a week.

Shanna Micko: I kind of love that. That’s cool.

Laura Birek: So you show up and you all go behind a curtain to get weighed and do all that stuff and get a quick sonogram measured or whatever you do and then you talk about a topic every week and it sounds really fun. Obviously, everyone in the group is due around the same time. She said there were seven women in her group and she ended up finding it to be really, really beneficial for her and there’s also studies that show. Like there was this one. It said a 2016 study of a South Carolina CenteringPregnancy Program found that participating in it reduced the risk of premature birth by 36%.

Shanna Micko: That’s huge.

Laura Birek: A lot of these are studies done without risk in low income groups, but I think they’re saying there’s benefit for all pregnant people. But I thought it was really interesting and I was a little bit jealous, but I also kind of realized that we kind of created our own little centering pregnancy group with this podcast.

Shanna Micko: We did.

Laura Birek: There was something really fun about that. I feel like with the combination of the podcast and me going to prenatal yoga kind of made this happen for me. I met a lot of people who were pregnant and then we just through interacting with people listening to the show on Instagram and stuff, I felt like we really just got a lot of great feedback and kind of had a little cohort of our own that we went through. I thought it was really fun.

Shanna Micko: That’s so cool.

Laura Birek: I’d love to be involved in one of these if I get pregnant again. I don’t think I’m going to switch doctors, because I love him and I will follow him to the end of the earth. But if his practice starts this, I would sign myself up. It sounds great.

Shanna Micko: That’s interesting. I wonder if any doctors are going to move towards this or try it out and see if it’s beneficial to their patients or doctors in LA might be like, no, let’s just stick with the traditional.

Laura Birek: It also seems like a really efficient way of scheduling, because it’s like the same time every week or whatever. Maybe it’s every week or every other week. That way you know you see the chunk of patients for this hour and then it’s done and it’s not like people aren’t missing their appointments, because the schedule gets all messed up.

Shanna Micko: You don’t have to answer the same questions a million times. You can answer to a group of people. Very cool. That’s interesting. Love it.

Laura Birek: So there’s a lot of cool stuff happening out there in the world of pregnancy I think and preventing pregnancy.

Shanna Micko: Exactly. All right. Shall we move on to our BFPs and BFNs after this break?

Laura Birek: Let’s do it.

[Music]

Shanna Micko: Let’s wrap things up with our big fat positives and big fat negatives of the week. Laura, what do you have for us?

Laura Birek: I have a BFN.

Shanna Micko: Ooh.

Laura Birek: Okay. So earlier I talked about how my hair is falling out. I got that postnatal hair loss. The thing that’s adding insult to injury is that I have a grabby baby and he is obsessed with grabbing the hair at the nap of my neck and just holding on. I’ll hold him on my hip and he will have one arm out and one arm, he grabs onto the hair at the nap of my neck and just holds on like it’s an anchor and it hurts. I tell him. I say, “Oh, baby. You know that hurts, mommy. Let’s not do that.” But he can’t. He’s just learning how to grab things. He doesn’t know that that’s a bad thing to grab. He’s like, well, if I hold here, I feel more stable. I tried holding him lower. I tried holding him in different positions. But you know when you’re walking around the house, you need to put the baby on one hip most of the time, because you have to have a hand free to grab other things. So he’s been helping me with my postnatal hair loss and also it’s just adding the pain. But I’m turning my BFN to a BFP, because I was like, I can’t be the only person that this has happened to. There has to be a solution. So I found this product on where else? Amazon.com called Toes Home. I don’t know it’s the brand. Toes like your toes on your feet: 6 Pieces Outdoor Magic Headband and it’s like an elastic headband.

Shanna Micko: Okay. Six pieces?

Laura Birek: Six of them for $10.

Shanna Micko: Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I was imagining the band itself has six elements to it.

Laura Birek: No. No. No. You don’t get six pieces to your headband. 

It takes you an hour to put it on.

Shanna Micko: Wow. This is a complicated headband.

Laura Birek: No, it’s a single piece of very elastic fabric that has cute patterns on it. They give you all these different ways you can wear it, but I just wear it around. I put it around the base of the nap of my neck and around the top of my head. Also a benefit is that it covers that massive part that’s formed.

Shanna Micko: Good.

Laura Birek: So if we go out into the sun, I look weird, but it gives me some UV production. So that’s helped. He’ll grab the edge of it, but he can’t get a hold of my hair that way and so now I’m walking around with this head scarf thing.

Shanna Micko: Does he pull your hair even when it’s up in a ponytail or bun?

Laura Birek: Yes, but it’s worse when it’s down. He can get a real good anchor when it’s up, because it’s steady for him. But then when it’s down, he’s really pulling it out. He gets all tangled in his little fingers.

Shanna Micko: Oh my gosh.

Laura Birek: So there’s no winning, but the elastic head magic headband is helping me out. So that’s my BFN turned into a BFP this week.

Shanna Micko: Nice.

Laura Birek: Shanna, how about you?

Shanna Micko: I have a BFP.

Laura Birek: Good.

Shanna Micko: I feel like a very big dork that I am so excited about this product that has come into my life and how long I’ve been eyeing it. It’s been living in my Amazon shopping cart for probably a year and I just have not pulled the trigger. I’m always like, do we really have an extra $130 for this that I really, really want it? Anyway, it’s the Bissell Carpet Cleaner, which I feel like says a lot about my personality, like how much I want this and how excited I am about this and also how messy my life is with two dogs and two small children. I recommend this for anyone who has carpets. We don’t have. We have hardwood, but we’ve got a lot of area rugs.

Laura Birek: You have a lot of area rugs. I feel like you have some shag area rugs on your pile.

Shanna Micko: I love them. Yes, I like a soft shaggy rug and you know I have two dogs. My one dog, Chili, he’s just so adorable. But if we’re not around, he gets anxious or whatever and he will whizzle on rugs and we have thrown away so many rugs and so I’m like, if I could just like deep clean the rugs instead.

Laura Birek: That’s cheaper than buying new rugs all the time.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, exactly. So I finally bit the bullet and bought this thing. The reason why is I got my older daughter Elle for her Easter basket these gigantic, they’re probably like two foot long. They’re called Sidewalk Chalk Markers and they’re filled with chalk powder and you’re supposed to put water in them and whatever. I turn my back and she takes these big, long things as a three-year-old does and starts banging them on the coffee table like drumsticks and they’re so cheap that it cracked in half and green chalk powder went poof all over the white rug that I had just recently put down maybe two weeks earlier, a brand new white, which were, Shanna, why are you even having white rugs in your home with dogs and two children?

Laura Birek: If that’s not optimism, what is?

Shanna Micko: I know. That also says a lot about my personality.

Laura Birek: It does.

Shanna Micko: So I had a huge green stain on this new rug and I just wasn’t ready to toss another rug yet. So I bought the Bissell, which I had my eye on and I was thrilled to go to town on this green stain and see the before and after.

Laura Birek: Do you have pictures?

Shanna Micko: I have pictures. I have a video. I documented it on my Instagram stories for all my fellow nerds and I feel like it did a pretty good job. Not 100%. Maybe like 85%. But it’s way less noticeable now and I’m very happy.

Laura Birek: Yeah, I can’t wait to see that and I appreciate a good cleaning, so I’m with you on that.

Shanna Micko: No, a good deep clean is so satisfying. I have never used one, but I’m also really, really into the idea of getting a power washer to power wash the sidewalk and the patio, because I’ve seen the before and after of a power washer and I’m just like drool, these are the kinds of Instagram feeds that I just love. It’s like, the before and after of crazy stuff like that.

Laura Birek: Do you know where it hits me is if you leave me home alone with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

Shanna Micko: Those are good.

Laura Birek: I go everywhere around finding little scuffs on the wall.

Shanna Micko: So satisfying.

Laura Birek: I go down that rabbit hole hard, so I feel you. I can’t wait to see the photos.

Shanna Micko: Yes, I will share. You guys can be the judge whether or not this thing did the trick.

Laura Birek: Amazing.

Shanna Micko: Anyway, that’s all I got. Should we wrap this thing up?

Laura Birek: We should. We both need sleep.

Shanna Micko: And dinner.

Laura Birek: That too.

Shanna Micko: All right. Oh my gosh, you guys thank you so much for listening. We love you and we love hearing from you: your emails, your comments, everything. So please let us know. What are your BFPs, BFNs? Do you have any cleaning products that you love to have with children? Laura, how can they reach us?

Laura Birek: We’re on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at BFP Podcast. On Facebook we also have a community group you can join. Just search for Big Fat Positive community and you’ll find us. Also, it would be amazing if you could rate and review us on whatever podcast platform you listen in, especially if it’s Apple podcast. That really helps us get on the charts and get more listeners. Also, make sure you hit the subscribe button, because that helps us so much. Thank you if you’ve already done that.

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

Laura Birek: Thanks for listening, everyone. We’re off to go eat and sleep.

Shanna Micko: Bye.

Laura Birek: Bye.

[Music]