Ep. 62: Bye-Bye Breastfeeding!

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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 one of our favorite special segments, Internet Insanity, where I learned about a truly shocking beauty regimen and Laura puts us all to the challenge. We wrap things up with our weekly BFPs and BFNs. Let’s get started.

[Music]

Shanna Micko: Hey. Welcome to episode 62. Laura, how are you?

Laura Birek: Hi. We’re doing good. How are you?

Shanna Micko: Good. How old’s your baby? What’s going on?

Laura Birek: My baby is seven months old.

Shanna Micko: Woo-hoo!

Laura Birek: He turned seven months this week and oh boy, it’s been a week. He is starting to do an army crawl.

Shanna Micko: All right.

Laura Birek: He’s not really interested in getting his knees underneath him. But he puts his little right elbow out and then with his left foot, he pushes off at the same time and he can get around pretty well like that. So now we’re in for it because he’s mobile.

Shanna Micko: Oh, yeah.

Laura Birek: It’s one of those things where it’s like, oh shit, we got to baby proof now.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, hide that Cat Water.

Laura Birek: Got to hide that Cat Water, cat food. Who knows? Cat litter.

Shanna Micko: Everything cats.

Laura Birek: But that’s exciting because you know it’s always exciting when they hit a new, big motor milestone. So I was excited to see that and I feel like he’s been very motor advanced according to his doctor, but on this one, he’s kind of average it seems like.

Shanna Micko: Okay.

Laura Birek: It seems like his friends from Mommy & Me are already doing the army crawl and if I remember CeCe was planking at six months. He’s never done a plank.

Shanna Micko: Why jump into exercise that’s painful and cruel before you have to?

Laura Birek: He is my son, so if I could get away with never doing a plank again, I would. So I don’t blame him, but yeah, it’s exciting that he’s starting to move around and a little terrifying at the same time. Let’s see. There’s another thing that’s happening this week is we have decided to transition from three naps to two naps.

Shanna Micko: This is quite a clear delineation. I feel like our nap schedule’s just been like, whatever happens. It’s kind of working down kind of, but sounds like you made a firm decision about it.

Laura Birek: I did. I’ve talked about in the past how we started nap training and I didn’t really follow up, because it’s been a long process. Our nap training is essentially like sleep training at night, but for naps and so what we do is we’ve created a little mini routine for the nap. So instead of like dinner and bath, what we do is we nurse and then we sing like one song and we read books, because he doesn’t want to read books before bedtime. But I figured that’s the time he can sort of get some books in and also for naptime routine, we dim the room and I turn the white noise on before we start everything, because the whole idea is we’re trying to get him into the mindset of sleep. But with the nighttime sleep training, I was actually keeping the lights on up until the very last second, because I didn’t want him to fall asleep nursing.

Shanna Micko: Oh, right.

Laura Birek: So with this it’s a little bit of the inverse, because I want to get him into the sleeping mindset and it’s been working and then what you do is you put him down awake but drowsy in the crib and if he cries you do your pop-ins and the thing that I didn’t really know what to do about is how long do you keep popping in? Taking Cara Babies says you should give him 45 minutes to an hour and I was like, oh God, I hope that doesn’t happen and thankfully that didn’t happen. The most he ever cried I think was 20 minutes at the very beginning of nap training, which was painful. But he actually eventually went to sleep and then the other part of nap training is you consider anything less than 50 minutes to be too short and you let them try to put themselves back to sleep if they wake up before 50 minutes and this is where we sort of run into problems because with the three naps, it just seems like he wasn’t tired enough to really get a good nap in and also with three naps, it’s hard to do stuff with your day because your wake windows are between one and a half to two hours, I think. Let me look this up. When you do three naps, this is all according to Taking Cara Babies, I think her name is Cara Dumaplin. I always want to call her Cara Duplin.

Laura Birek: So she says that if you’re between five and six or six to seven months, so like five to seven months, your wake windows should be between two and three hours. That means that if you’re going out and you need to be back for nap training, because the idea is you should be doing your nap training in the crib. You are rushed like, okay. We’re going to go to the store, we’re going to get this all done in like 30 minutes and we’re going to be back and then we’re going to do our wind down routine and it was getting really hard. But then I realized also he was starting to have early wake ups. He was starting to wake up at like 5:30 in the morning again and that was a sign that something was weird and then I read her little summary that she has in the pamphlet that she gives you. It’s more like a booklet. It’s actually pretty long that you get when you buy the ABC’s of Sleep course, that’s the course for between 5 and 24 months and it says, “Signs it’s time to transition to two naps: baby is six to seven months old and at least one of the following. A) baby starts to struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep at nap time.” That’s actually always was his deal. He could never stay asleep like past 25, 30 minutes. Remember he’s a short naper.

Shanna Micko: Right. He was a very short naper.

Laura Birek: So I was like, well, that was already the case. He already checked one of the boxes.

Shanna Micko: What is the age between five and seven months?

Laura Birek: No, between six and seven months. So if your baby is between six and seven months and at least one of the following is happening.

Shanna Micko: Okay.

Laura Birek: “B) Nap number three interferes with bedtime. So there’s not enough time for a full wake window before the appropriate bedtime.” That was also happening. So he’d wake up at like 5:30, but then by seven he was really tired and then there wasn’t enough wake time before bed. C was babies consistently refusing nap three. We also had that. I would have to boob him to sleep for the third nap.

Shanna Micko: Right.

Laura Birek: Then D was early morning wakings or middle of the night wakings begin or never seemed to stop despite sleep training. We thankfully had had them stop thanks to sleep training. But they started again: the early morning wakings and I was like, okay, my baby is six to seven months and fits all of the following. I did probably transition. So we started her method of transitioning, which the plan was to do her transition period where you start stretching those wake windows and she writes about how hard it’s going to be and yada, yada. He literally took to it day one.

Shanna Micko: Oh, good.

Laura Birek: So we’re doing it and I don’t want to jinx it, but he has been sleeping so much better during the day. He’s getting more sleep on aggregate, like for the number of hours he’s asleep during his two naps that he ever got with his three naps. So I have high hopes about this. I think it’s great.

Shanna Micko: That’s awesome.

Laura Birek: Yes, here’s the complicating factor. It turns out he has an air infection.

Shanna Micko: That will mess with things.

Laura Birek: I don’t know if I can trust the nap training or if it’s just because the poor guy is sick and in pain. Do you remember how for like three weeks he had parvovirus then he got a cold? He had this cough that just kept lingering and eventually it was Friday actually of this week I called my doctor to be like, “Look, it’s going to be the weekend. He’s still coughing. Otherwise he’s acting fine, but let’s just like, make sure it’s okay,” and they’re like, “If he’s still coughing, you should bring him in.” So I bring him in, doctor takes his temperature, goes through the whole rigamarole, looks in the ears, looks down the throat and she’s like, “The cough is fine, but he has a raging ear infection.”

Shanna Micko: Oh my gosh.

Laura Birek: I was like, am I a terrible mom? I was like, oh my God, I had no idea. He’s not tugging on his ears. He didn’t have a fever and my doctor said that apparently asymptomatic ear infections are so common at this age that it’s super common for babies to come into their six or nine month well visit appointment and have a massive ear infection.

Shanna Micko: Oh, poor guys.

Laura Birek: I know. I felt so bad. Anyway, we got baby’s first antibiotics.

Shanna Micko: How did he do on those?

Laura Birek: He loves it. It tastes like candy. It’s amoxicillin bubble gum.

Shanna Micko: Yeah.

Laura Birek: It also brings back memories for me smelling it. I was like, I remember this.

Shanna Micko: No, I know what you mean. My older daughter has had that medicine before and it has not changed a bit since I was a kid.

Laura Birek: I know like the eighties. It’s amazing. He’s great. Hopefully, we have a check. They only wanted to see him three weeks later, even though it was I think seven days of the antibiotics. So we’ll see. But it doesn’t seem to bother him.

Shanna Micko: That’s good news at least.

Laura Birek: I should say that my doctor is very hesitant to give antibiotics. She said that normally what they do is when they see an ear infection in a baby of this age, they like to wait and see and recheck in like a week, because sometimes they’ll just resolve. But she said, because he had been sick for three weeks and because of the severity of it, she gave antibiotics. So another doctor of the practice was like, she actually gave you antibiotics, because she’s known as the doctor who will not give antibiotics.

Shanna Micko: Oh, wow.

Laura Birek: It must have been pretty bad.

Shanna Micko: It must have been really raging.

Laura Birek: I know. Poor guy. Anyway, again, it doesn’t seem to bother him, but I feel bad.

Shanna Micko: He doesn’t seem bothered by it and he’s sleeping, so you would think if he was in pain, he would not be sleeping during nap.

Laura Birek: You’d think, right? That’s what I’m holding onto. That is the rollercoaster that we’ve been on this week.

Shanna Micko: Woo.

Laura Birek: I feel like I’ve gone highs and lows and everywhere in between.

Shanna Micko: Nope.

Laura Birek: Shanna, why don’t you tell me how old is your baby this week? I have a guess.

Shanna Micko: Eight months old.

Laura Birek: Yay.

Shanna Micko: We have big news this week. We stopped breastfeeding.

Laura Birek: Aww, how do you feel?

Shanna Micko: Good, because it was intentional for me. I was doing the weaning process, but I didn’t know exactly when it would end, because I was going with the flow and I didn’t want to ever put too much pressure or emotion on the final feed or anything like that. So my mindset was always I’ll drop this feed and see how we all do and I just kept doing that and doing that until we were down to one last feed in the mornings and I was like, I’m not going to ever just pick a day and be like today’s the last day, because I just felt like I would be an emotional mess if I was so specific about it.

Laura Birek: Sure. Yeah.

Shanna Micko: So I was like, you know what? It’s not bad and maybe I’ll just keep this up for six more months. Who knows? I’m willing to go with the flow and the first few days we were doing it once in the morning and I just kept thinking if I ever just wake up one morning and think I don’t really want to do it this morning. I’ll try a bottle instead. Then we just will and two days later I woke up with that feeling.

Laura Birek: Really?

Shanna Micko: Yeah, two days later I was like, let’s just try a bottle this morning and just see how it goes and she was fine. She was not sentimental about quitting.

Laura Birek: Aww.

Shanna Micko: Which is good. Good for me. We did a bottle and she went the whole day with bottles and she was great and I was okay and I was like, well, in hindsight it was better. I was like, gosh, that was probably our last nursing and so it was less emotional for me to think of it that way in hindsight. But then by 6:00 p.m. the next day my boobs were killing me.

Laura Birek: I was going to ask, how does that work?

Shanna Micko: You kind of get engorged even though I’d been tapering off. It still builds up and stuff and I wasn’t sure what that was all going to be like and so by 6:00 p.m. the next day I was feeling that and I was like, I guess maybe I could just like pump a little bit to relieve the pressure and I got out the hand pump and I was like, I don’t want pumping to be my last hurrah ever with breastfeeding. Definitely don’t want that.

Laura Birek: Yeah.

Shanna Micko: So I nursed her before bed a little bit that nigh and in my head I was like, I think this is definitely the last one. I’m getting a little emotional and which is crazy because I intended to do this. This was my choice, but still a lot of emotions are all tied up in it.

Laura Birek: Just because you did it intentionally doesn’t mean it doesn’t have emotions attached.

Shanna Micko: Yes, exactly.

Laura Birek: Not to mention the hormones.

Shanna Micko: Oh, yeah. The hormones for sure. So I balled my eyes out the whole breastfeeding.

Laura Birek: Was CeCe like what is going on?

Shanna Micko: I think so. I think she was confused, but she’s really, really good at eye contact and she knows how to deliver it when you need it most. She’s just nursing and staring at me and I’m crying and I’m like, I think this is the last one, because I had gone 36 hours before I felt any pain or anything. So I knew it was kind of starting to dry up. I had taken Sudafed a couple days.

Laura Birek: You did?

Shanna Micko: Yeah. I was trying to dry it up with Sudafed. I took an allergy pill, an antihistamine.

Laura Birek: Plus you get all that energy from that Sudafed.

Shanna Micko: You know I love Sudafed. We’ve talked about that before.

Laura Birek: I know. We’re such maniacs for Sudafed.

Shanna Micko: I knew that the milk was drying up and this would probably be it, so I didn’t even nurse her very long. Just enough to kind of like make myself feel a little bit better and then I was like, okay, you’ll have a bottle for the rest and she gave me that eye contact and I gave it right back and just snuggled my little sweetie and that was that.

Laura Birek: Aww. Wow.

Shanna Micko: End of an era.

Laura Birek: It is. You got your boobs back.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, I do.

Laura Birek: Your boobs are yours again. Amazing. What’s that like?

Shanna Micko: It’s good. I like it. I love the baby snuggles, but I don’t need that type of contact to feel close to my baby and snugly. She’s a pretty snugly baby anyway, which is nice. It’s nice to have my boobs back and not be producing the milk and not being worried about supply and all of that stuff that goes along with it. It’s just like signing out.

Laura Birek: Bye. Congratulations.

Shanna Micko: Thank you. I feel good.

Laura Birek: Good. I’m glad. That’s how you should feel. You went eight months. That’s a long ass time.

Shanna Micko: That was a record for me. Of all the times I’ve breastfed in my life, one other time I made it six months. So I beat my record.

Laura Birek: That’s all we care about is beating our previous records.

Shanna Micko: Anyway, that’s really my only check-in this week. That’s what we’ve been doing.

Laura Birek: That’s a big thing.

Shanna Micko: Thank you. Should we take a break and move on to our special segments?

Laura Birek: I think we should.

Shanna Micko: Okay.

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Laura Birek: We’re back with our special segment and our special segment this week is a fun one. It’s Internet Insanity where we talk about the funny, hilarious, weird, bizarre, other adjectives things that we found on the internet. Shanna, do you have an internet insanity for us?

Shanna Micko: Oh, do I ever.

Laura Birek: I can’t wait. I love this segment.

Shanna Micko: I do too. Fair warning: this is probably going to sound X-rated, but it’s not.

Laura Birek: Okay. I was going to say we are an explicit podcast due to all the cursing.

Shanna Micko: Yes, true. So in one of my moms’ groups we talk about beauty things sometimes and something that came up recently is the penis facial. Right? See that sounds X-rated, but I swear it isn’t.

Laura Birek: I’m really curious how it’s not.

Shanna Micko: It’s kind of worse.

Laura Birek: Please tell me more.

Shanna Micko: It’s kind of even more. So this is like a big, high-end beauty treatment.

Laura Birek: Can I just reiterate that it’s called the penis facial?

Shanna Micko: It is.

Laura Birek: Like a part of the male genitalia?

Shanna Micko: Yes.

Laura Birek: Okay. Go on.

Shanna Micko: I highly doubt the high-end salon uses that term. They might use something fancier than the penis facial, but that’s what it is. So the likes of Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, these very sophisticated, beautiful women are doing this thing called the penis facial. Let me tell you all about it in case you want to get in on it, Laura.

Laura Birek: I’m withholding judgment. Go forth.

Shanna Micko: I looked this up and read an article on Huffington Post and saw a video of Sandra Bullock on the Ellen DeGeneres’ Show talking about how she gets her amazing facial that is from an extraction of the foreskins of Korean babies.

Laura Birek: Wait, what?

Shanna Micko: Yeah.

Laura Birek: This doesn’t sound legal.

Shanna Micko: It really doesn’t, right? The ethical implications are bananas here.

Laura Birek: Did she admit that that’s where it comes from?

Shanna Micko: So she’s very reluctant when she tries to describe it to Ellen. She’s like, “It’s from a body part of a very young person,” and Ellen’s like, “From the foreskins of Korean babies?” She’s like, “Mmh.”

Laura Birek: Oh my God.

Shanna Micko: The Huffington Post article is actually very helpful in understanding what this is and why. I guess the extraction from the foreskins helps generate collagen and elastin, which is very good for us geriatric skinned mammals. But here’s a quote so you can understand what’s going on here.

Laura Birek: Okay.

Shanna Micko: This is from the Huffington Post, “The treatment involves the use of something called epidermal growth factors or EGF for short, which are derived from stem cells taken from the discarded foreskins of newborn babies in Korea. EGF is said to help rejuvenate the skin, improve overall skin texture and correct discoloration. It’s also known for its ability to aid in wound healing.” You know what? They don’t call it the penis facial. They call it the Hollywood EGF Facial treatment and if you want it, Laura, you can just go to the Georgia Louise Atelier in New York. It’s a salon.

Laura Birek: That’s all?

Shanna Micko: That’s all and for the small price tag of $650.

Laura Birek: How many treatments do you need?

Shanna Micko: I think that’s a good question.

Laura Birek: It can’t be one. Baby foreskin cannot work on just one treatment.

Shanna Micko: No, you probably need multiple and here’s the real kicker. It works best if you micro needle it into your face.

Laura Birek: Oh, no.

Shanna Micko: Which means like poking a bunch of tiny holes in your face with needles and then shoving this foreskin juice into your skin.

Laura Birek: Oh, God.

Shanna Micko: Am I grossing everyone out? I hope everyone’s eaten breakfast this morning.

Laura Birek: Oh my God. There’s so many things wrong with this. First, it’s probably all bullshit, right? You can’t inject stem cells into your face and make your face grow collagen. I really don’t think that’s true.

Shanna Micko: I don’t, but I do have to say her skin did look gorgeous.

Laura Birek: Yeah, because she’s a fucking actress and that’s her job. She spends all her time looking gorgeous.

Shanna Micko: She’s absolutely wildly rich so she can afford any and everything to slather on that.

Laura Birek: She probably heard $650. That’s so affordable.

Shanna Micko: She’s like I might as well just go to Walgreens and buy something off the shelf.

Laura Birek: Oh, man. So there’s that. The problem, which I don’t think it actually would work. Then the problem is are these foreskins harvested with consent?

Shanna Micko: From the one-day-old baby?

Laura Birek: No, from the moms. Do the moms know that when they go to circumcise their baby that their little baby’s foreskins are going to be turned into rich people stupid facials?

Shanna Micko: That is a really good question. One thing that was said in the article, I definitely need to point out and I think maybe helps this a little bit is that the cells that are used in this facial cream are actually cloned cells from the foreskins. So they are not actually like little baby skin on your face. They’re cloned cells from that.

Laura Birek: Okay.

Shanna Micko: But still I don’t know if that’s something that people sign off on as being okay to use for.

Laura Birek: I’m going to doubt it. I also just have to say hats off to Korea. South Korea and their beauty routines put us all to shame. All of us.

Shanna Micko: I think aren’t they really big on like snail serum right now on your face?

Laura Birek: When I went to Asia for my honeymoon in late 2016, I remember in Hong Kong, all the ads in the subway were all for snail juice serum. I also realized that in a lot of Asia, like in Hong Kong, this was very clear. But I think in Korea, this is true too. Being very pale, very fair skinned is a thing that people want as a facial treatment.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God, finally, somewhere that my pale skin…

Laura Birek: Right. Translucent skin. I was like, I’m in a place where my fair skin is finally refreshable, but the amount of wrinkles I have and sun spots and I have not taken good enough care of my skin. My friend Shin, actually, she’s one of my oldest friends from high school. Her parents are immigrants from Korea. I guess that makes her second generation. I never remember first, second generation, but anyway, she’s steeped in Korean culture and she gives me shit every time she sees me about my face.

Shanna Micko: Really?

Laura Birek: The last time I spent an overnight with her was for my bachelorette weekend and a highlight of the weekend was her giving us all a lecture on how we’re doing our skincare wrong and showing us her skincare routine, which is like seven steps.

Shanna Micko: What? I think we need her as a guest on the show to teach us everything.

Laura Birek: I think she would love that.

Shanna Micko: I’m the worst. I’m just like, this thing’s $5 at Trader Joe’s. Okay. I’ll put it on my face.

Laura Birek: She’s like a high powered investment person and I don’t even really understand what she does and she has very good skin. It’s hard to argue, but anyway, again, hats off to Korea for finding the craziest ways of making you look young or think you’re going to look young. I do have to say I have a Korean BB cream or it’s actually I think a CC cream. It’s like tinted moisturizer, basically. I really like it.

Shanna Micko: Good. I was using some Korean products for a while and I think then I had a baby and that priority kind of went out of the window, but I would like to come back to it. But one thing I wanted to add is if you’re not comfortable slathering your face in foreskins, facials can and have also been made out of the following: placentas, urine, colostrum, and your own blood. So there’s options.

Laura Birek: I know about the blood facials. That shit is weird. It’s creepy.

Shanna Micko: What is it? They take your own blood and…

Laura Birek: They take your blood out. Then they centrifusion I think to get the platelets or something and then they do that micro needling shit, so your face looks like it’s bleeding. It’s disgusting.

Shanna Micko: I really want our listeners to write us and let us know if you’ve done any of this stuff. I want to know what it’s like, please.

Laura Birek: Set it straight. If I’m super judgy, I’m sorry. You can do what you need to do to make yourself feel good. I’m not ready to micro needle my own serum back into my face. I don’t know that you would do it yourself. I think you would’ve a technician do it, but still…

Laura Birek: There’s no DIY kit for that. How about the baby foreskin?

Shanna Micko: We’ve got our beauty regimens cut out for us Laura in the days to come. We will update everyone. Anyway, what about you? What have you discovered online lately?

Laura Birek: So my internet insanity is this amazing thing that I found on Instagram. Actually, our former guest, Teresa Keirns, the midwife from episode 10 sent this to me, because she was challenging me to do this and she had done this with her own son and it is #thighdropchallenge.

Shanna Micko: No, what is this?

Laura Birek: At first she sent me this thing. It was like thigh drop challenge. I was like, ooh, this sounds like thigh gap.

Shanna Micko: That’s what I’m thinking too.

Laura Birek: What is this about? But when you go to Instagram and put in #thighdropchallenge, you are confronted, they gifted with a bunch of videos in slow motion of people picking up their baby’s legs and then dropping them and then watching their thighs jiggle in slow motion.

Shanna Micko: Oh my God. Please, give me a moment to look this up. What’s it called?

Laura Birek: Thigh drop challenge.

Shanna Micko: Okay. Aww, that’s so cute.

Laura Birek: It’s just chubby baby leg after chubby baby leg slowly dropping and when I mean dropping, they’re sitting or lying down and they just pick their baby’s leg and let it drop down. Naturally, it’s not like they’re getting dropped on the floor and these jiggles.

Shanna Micko: I feel like my baby would be a very good contender for this.

Laura Birek: Oh, yeah. CeCe’s got good thigh chub.

Shanna Micko: She is so chubby. She gets comments on it from strangers all the time.

Laura Birek: My guy is starting to get chubbier thighs, but he’s still in like 10th percentile. So it’s not as good. I tried to do it by the way. Teresa wanted me. It’s a challenge. It’s not the thigh drop enjoyment. It’s the thigh drop challenge. So I tried, but my guy never stops moving like ever.

Shanna Micko: No, he doesn’t. He’s a moving little guy.

Laura Birek: He doesn’t sit still. So I tried to drop his leg and he was just like, I’m just going to hold it up. I’m just going to jiggle it around myself. I got a slowmo of him sort of kicking his legs and there was definitely some wobble there, but I was a little disappointed, because I couldn’t quite get my proper thigh drop.

Shanna Micko: You have time. I feel like you could probably do this up until one year of age maybe.

Laura Birek: I think that’s a good plan. That would be even better than those monthly pictures you take of just every month do a thigh drop challenge. My baby is eight months old. My baby is nine months old. Check out this chunk of leg.

Shanna Micko: Watch how the chunk increases. Put a little icon on there with nine months on it.

Laura Birek: There’s one with two babies next to each other. I don’t know if they’re twins or just friends. It’s so cute, so I highly encourage our listeners to go to Instagram and look up #thighdropchallenge and also we want to see your thigh drop challenges.

Shanna Micko: Yes.

Laura Birek: Make sure you tag us on Instagram. It’s at BFP Podcast. So send them to us. I’m dying to see your baby’s jiggly chunky thighs.

Shanna Micko: Me too.

Laura Birek: That sounds weird. But you know I mean it in the best way. I could just scroll through this forever, but I think maybe we should take a break and then go to our BFPs and BFNs.

[Music]

Shanna Micko: Let’s do it. We’re back and we’re going to wrap things up with our weekly BFPs and BFNs. Laura, you’re up first. What do you got for us?

Laura Birek: Okay. So I think this is a BFP. It kind of feels like a BFN, but I think it’s a BFP because it could be.

Shanna Micko: Is it a BFM: big fat medium?

Laura Birek: That seems like an oxymoron: a big fat, medium.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, it does. Okay. Forget I said it.

Laura Birek: No, that’s funny. Actually, I’d love your opinion on this, but I just kind of want to talk about it, because it’s been on my mind. I’ve been seeing this quote floating around Facebook and Instagram and all those social medias ever since the summer began and we’re starting to get to the end of the summer. Like the summer is winning, right? This has been on my mind. So here’s the quote, “We get 18 delicious summers with our children. This is one of your 18. If that’s not perspective, I don’t know what is,” and attributed to someone named Jessica Scott. I can’t verify that, but this idea that you only have 18 summers with your children, it fucked me up, Shanna. It screwed with my brain.

Shanna Micko: Well, my heart sank when I heard you read it, but it sank in a happy, sad way. That’s kind of a mind fuck.

Laura Birek: Yeah, it’s really rough. Of course, instantly I read that and I was like, oh my God, I’ve wasted the first one. But also it did make me think like, no, I didn’t waste it. You spent it with him. You really took your time, time passes and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it made me take a moment and really reflect and realize that like, yes, it feels like when you have a baby, the baby’s never going to grow up. You’re so in this world of naps and sleep and feeding and breastfeeding and all this stuff that you’re in this fog of having an infant that it’s so hard to even conceptualize that they’re ever going to be grownups, even little kids. When you hear something like that, 18 is such a small number. I have more knitting works in progress than 18.

Shanna Micko: I think I have more years alive after high school. No, I definitely do.

Laura Birek: Oh, yeah. I’m not going to out you, but people know you’re older than that. It’s really interesting and impressive. I feel like it’s a sad thing, but also a good thing to be reminded of.

Shanna Micko: Also, summer is such a special time. It’s a very specific quote to a time in my childhood that was the most memorable mostly just because school was out of session, but it just really felt so fun and you got to do all the carefree, wonderful things and it’s a little harder to do when you have a newborn and a very small infant, because our spring kind of bled into our summer, which is bleeding into our fall. So there’s not really that delineation, but I get what they’re saying there and it makes me very wistful and nostalgic for my childhood and wanting to give my babies the same kind of adventurous, fun, memorable summer.

Laura Birek: I do think there could be a downside to this, which is putting too much pressure on you. There’s so much pressure on moms to do everything right and make the most of every moment that I wouldn’t want this quote to do that to anyone, but it’s hard to argue with it. It’s true. You really do only have 18 summers and you can extrapolate that. That’s 18 times three months. It’s not a short amount of time, but it’s finite and that’s if you’re lucky if you get all your summers. I graduated from high school yearly, so I totally cheated my parents of one of my summers.

Shanna Micko: You totally did.

Laura Birek: I did. Anyway, I hope with the last days of summer, we’re really cherishing in them in the way that we want to and need to and not putting extra pressure. I think reflection never hurts.

Shanna Micko: Right. Exactly. This quote reminds me of something I also came across online maybe like a year or so ago, a kind of thing that is a mind fuck for me but also in that way of remember to cherish the moments.

Laura Birek: Embracing myself.

Shanna Micko: It was this, “At some point, your parents picked you up, put you down and never picked you back up again,” which is so weird and so crazy to think about.

Laura Birek: It’s so true.

Shanna Micko: But yes, my parents held me for the last time. Obviously, they haven’t picked me up in decades and when is going to be the last time I’m going to pick up CeCe or Elle. Elle’s three and a half now. She’s getting heavier. I foresee a few more years of at least occasionally picking her up and being able to do that, but it’s just one of those things that’s like, oh, yeah. This experience as you know it is at some point going to come to an end and it’s just like, ah.

Laura Birek: It’s a good thing to remember when they are fussy and not wanting to play by themselves and reaching for you. We get a lot of that in this house and it’s just like, I just want to put you down for a second, baby. Okay, this isn’t going to last forever. There is going to be a day where you don’t want me to pick you up and then I will cry. You’ll be like, eww, mom, stop crying. I’ll be like, you are my little baby. You’re like, I’m a big kid now and then we’re going to get in a fight.

Shanna Micko: He’ll be 25 at that point, so it’s all good.

Laura Birek: I just want to go to my entry level job, mom. Oh, well, yeah. Okay. Wait, is that a BFP or a BFN? What do you think?

Shanna Micko: I think that’s a BFP.

Laura Birek: I’ll take it, so I have a BFP.

Shanna Micko: All right.

Laura Birek: Shanna, what about you?

Shanna Micko: I have a BFN.

Laura Birek: Ooh.

Shanna Micko: So as I mentioned, I stopped breastfeeding. For some weird cosmic reason, on the same day I stopped breastfeeding, I started a new birth control pill and I got my first postpartum period. ALL on the same day, so this week has been an emotional mess.

Laura Birek: Oh, man, you get pretty bad PMS if I recall.

Shanna Micko: I do, but I got a really low dose birth control pill that my doctor prescribed me to try to avoid PMS.

Laura Birek: Got it.

Shanna Micko: So that’s the one I started. I had to start a new one because I quit breastfeeding. So the one I was on is not going to protect from anything anymore: just new hormones going in my body, hormones leaving my body. Breastfeeding releases oxytocin, the feel good hormone, so that’s on its way out, the progesterone and estrogens on the way in and then my body is like, we’re just going to bleed.

Laura Birek: Cruel.

Shanna Micko: It was maybe not the best day for me to learn that my daughter only had 17 more summers.

Laura Birek: If I had known, Shanna…

Shanna Micko: I’m holding it together. That’s it. There’s not too much to say. I was without a period for a long time and it was really nice. There we go again.

Laura Birek: Did I mention I got mine back at four months, which is really rude?

Shanna Micko: Oh, that is rude.

Laura Birek: I breastfeed constantly and I still got it back.

Shanna Micko: Oh, man.

Laura Birek: The good thing is I got a Mirena IUD right about I think at three months postpartum. I can’t remember exactly, but so that kind of stops you from having real periods anyway. I had one cycle that was awful and then I’m hoping it’ll cut down on the bleeding, because I loved my Mirena.

Shanna Micko: Yeah, I hope so.

Laura Birek: I had my Mirena for five years before pulling it to try to conceive and so I’m a big fan of it. One of the real benefits is that it really almost gives you non-existent periods. It’s really interesting for me. I could still tell I was ovulating and I was cycling, but I just didn’t have the bleeding, which is great.

Shanna Micko: Weird.

Laura Birek: It’s funny because I thought maybe I’m imagining the ovulation, but then I took it out and I could tell when I was ovulating and it all synced up with when I ended up conceiving and I started doing the ovulation test kits and they totally synced up. So I could feel when I ovulated. It hurts. There’s actually no general word for it. It’s mittelschmerz. I don’t know why that’s so funny. It means like pain in the center or in the middle.

Shanna Micko: I think so, yeah.

Laura Birek: I feel the mittelschmerz. Anyway, I feel for you.

Shanna Micko: Thank you.

Laura Birek: I know what’s that like.

Shanna Micko: No, we shall recover.

Laura Birek: Yes, we shall soldier on.

Shanna Micko: Exactly. But that’s pretty much it from me this week and shall we wrap things up.

Laura Birek: I think we should.

Shanna Micko: All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. We really appreciate all the support and we really love hearing from you guys. It’s so wonderful to get messages from our listeners. Laura, remind everyone where they can reach us.

Laura Birek: We’re on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at BFP Podcast. We also have a Facebook community group. It’s a closed group, so you have to ask to join and that just keeps the conversations private. So click request to join, I will approve you and you can join in the great conversations. We’re having some awesome conversations in there. Love it.

Shanna Micko: We’re having fun.

Laura Birek: Real fun stuff. Great stuff in there. We also have a website, bigfatpositivepodcast.com, where you can go and you can see our show notes. You can see links to stuff we talked about in this episode. We have a page called favorites, that’s bigfatpositivepodcast.com/favorites, where we actually have a big list of all the BFPs we’ve had. So you can just quickly find something that we talked about and we also have a registry page. I think you probably heard an ad for it earlier, where you can see our favorite items for baby registries. So go check that out.

Shanna Micko: If you loved the show, please spread the word. If you know someone who’s pregnant or a new parent, we would love for you to let them know about Big Fat Positive and please leave us a rating and review on whatever platform you listen to podcasts. Big Fat Positive is produced by Laura Birek, Shanna Micko and Steve Yager. Bye.

Laura Birek: Bye. Thanks for listening.

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