Ep. 7: Babymoon Bliss and Nursery Nightmares

Shanna Micko: Hi. Welcome to Big Fat Positive with Shanna and Laura. I’m Shanna.

Laura Birek: And I’m Laura.

Shanna Micko: We are friends and writing partners who are pregnant at the same time, so we started a podcast about it.

Laura Birek: This week, we’ve got our weekly check-ins, we’ve got our special segment, “What I Googled this week,” where Shanna asks her search engine, “Is this normal? Maybe one too many times,” and then we’ve got our BFPs and BFNs. Let’s get to it.

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Laura Birek: Hey. Welcome to episode seven of Big Fat Positive.

Shanna Micko: Hello, everybody. Why don’t we get started with our weekly check-ins? Laura, what do you got for us this week?

Laura Birek: Oh, I’ve got a good one.

Shanna Micko: Ooh.

Laura Birek: I went to Hawaii.

Shanna Micko: Awesome.

Laura Birek: It was the best. I want to go back.

Shanna Micko: So basically your week was just one big BFP.

Laura Birek: It was. It was a giant BFP. Shanna, we went to Maui, my husband and I. It was a trip that we actually had been trying to take for about a year and a half. We went to this fundraiser that had a silent auction. Gosh, it was like over a year ago and it turns out one of my husband’s friends had his condo in Maui up for silent auction. There weren’t a lot of people who could really take on those sort of bigger ticket items, so we ended up getting a full week at this really nice condo in Maui for $700.

Shanna Micko: Nice.

Laura Birek: Which is a pretty darn good deal and we got to know that our money went to a good cause, which was extra nice, but then we had to schedule it and scheduling it took forever. Then when I found out I was pregnant, it was like, we got to schedule this soon or else we’re never going to go. So we finally figured out a time that we could go and we went and we literally did nothing. Every day, we went down to the beach and we sat on the beach all day, read, did a lot of crossword puzzles.

Shanna Micko: Aww. That’s so romantic.

Laura Birek: Yeah, that’s definitely my version of romance. I guess we did go out to a couple nice dinners, but really it was the best, because we didn’t do anything. My husband and I are really compatible in that way. We both just enjoy sitting and reading and we could do it all day long. So that’s exactly what we did.

Shanna Micko: Awesome. Did you consider that your baby moon?

Laura Birek: Yes, we were calling it our baby moon, even though it was so early, because the other part of my weekly check-in is that I’m finally out of the first trimester.

Shanna Micko: You planned that trip perfectly then?

Laura Birek: Yes, it was our first trimester baby moon or end of the first trimester baby moon. So it couldn’t have been better and I just wish we could live there forever. I love Hawaii so much.

Shanna Micko: That sounds so nice. You guys, aside from just enjoying the scenery that is Hawaii, you also beat the heat. It was hotter than hell here. It was like 114 degrees. I was just angry all week basically.

Laura Birek: Oh, no. That’s really, really brutal.

Shanna Micko: It is. I grew up in Phoenix and that’s the temps I escaped from when I moved to Southern California. So when it hits that here, I’m just, no. It’s not cool. You picked the perfect week to go. I’m so happy you guys escaped it and had an awesome time.

Laura Birek: It was great. We loved it. Anyway, tell me about your week.

Shanna Micko: I’m starting to feel baby kicking and flipping and moving. It’s like small movements.

Laura Birek: How many weeks are you again?

Shanna Micko: I’m 18 weeks now.

Laura Birek: Okay. I should say that I was 14 weeks. That should be clear, because I’m out of the first trimester, but should have mentioned that.

Shanna Micko: Even though I’ve been feeling little things here and there for a little while, you just never know at the beginning. I don’t know if you’re feeling anything yet, but I was like, I don’t know. Is it just like gas bubbles? For some reason suddenly I feel gas bubbles like I never did before. So it probably was the baby, but now it’s getting more obvious and it’s so fun and reassuring to know she’s in there twirling and kicking and swimming and I love it. That makes me really happy.

Laura Birek: Aww. That’s so cool. What does it feel like? How would you explain it?

Shanna Micko: Well, those first ones are just like maybe there’s little bubbles inside. For me, it was pretty low down, like below my belly button. It was like little bubbles inside popping or something, like pop, pop, pop. It’s very subtle. I was pregnant with my daughter, so I know how. Why is the word violent coming into my head? The kids aren’t ever violent, but you just feel them more when they’re harder as she gets older. But in the beginning, it’s like this little popping, tickling feeling. It’s really cute.

Laura Birek: It’s got to really weird. I’m looking forward to that. I’m definitely too early to feel any. I think some people say around 16 weeks is about the earliest, but usually for a first child, it’s way longer than that. Right?

Shanna Micko: Yeah, I think that’s what I’ve heard too and even when I went for a checkup like a week ago, the doctor’s like, “You’re not going to feel anything for another week or two, so don’t even worry about it,” because I think women kind of freak out about that. It was a hot topic on my baby board this week. A lot of people are like, “I’m not feeling anything yet. Should I be feeling stuff, blah, blah, blah?” I worry about that stuff too. It’s totally common. It’ll probably be a little while for you.

Laura Birek: I’ll just have to be patient.

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Laura Birek: Our next segment is, “What I Googled this week,” where we talk about all the secret shames of our Google history. Shanna, I’m really curious. What is in your search bar this week?

Shanna Micko: All right. I have two if we have time to just touch on a couple gems.

Laura Birek: Let’s go crazy.

Shanna Micko: I’m 18 weeks and this week I Googled, “18 weeks pregnant. Butt hurts when sitting.” I was like, what? This is crazy. I work a desk job and so I sit on my butt a lot, but I’ve never had this kind of. It’s not even like I hiked a mountain or anything. The pain of sitting on my ass is insane for some reason.

Laura Birek: Is it pain, pain or achy?

Shanna Micko: Achy. It’s not sharp shooty or anything like that. But it’s weird, because I never really experienced anything like that, so I’m like, obviously it must be associated with pregnancy, because every weird new thing is. So I had to Google it and I guess your hip bones down there or something are spreading out and so it’s stretching things out. I think you mentioned before the relaxing hormone that’s going through your body relaxing things probably has something to do with it too. Who knew that sitting on my butt at work could cause me pain while pregnant?

Laura Birek: How often do you stand up? That’s another good question.

Shanna Micko: Oh, I don’t know. Once an hour maybe.

Laura Birek: That’s pretty good. That’s better than me, honestly.

Shanna Micko: Really?

Laura Birek: I know, because when you have an Apple watch, it tells you if you’ve stood for one minute out of every hour and when you get to 50 minutes past the hour it warns you. It say, “You still have a chance to stand up this hour,” and it totally bugs you and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on deadline and just been like, “Shut up Apple watch. I can’t stand up.” It’s the saddest thing, because you should really be able to stand up for one minute out of every hour. But I can’t tell you how very infrequently I actually meet my stand goal for the day.

Shanna Micko: That’s crazy. You don’t need an Apple watch when you have a bladder that’s screaming at you to go pee every hour. There’s that.

Laura Birek: That’s yes. I’ve been blessed most of my life with a gigantic bladder. Like I was the kid who could last the whole field trip without going to the bathroom and so I think I have a little bit of advantage.

Shanna Micko: Learn something about your friend every day.

Laura Birek: Yeah, my friends would always have to stop on road trips and I’d be fine. I think now maybe I’m easing into average bladder capacity and I’m sure soon it’ll be a bigger problem.

Shanna Micko: You know that’s actually a perfect segue into my second admission of what I Googled this week.

Laura Birek: I can’t wait.

Shanna Micko: “18 weeks pregnant. Pee when sneeze.” It has only happened once so far, but of course, the second it happens, I have to ask Google and make sure it’s normal in pregnancy and it’s not my body deteriorating and it’s totally normal, because all the weight is putting more pressure on you.

Laura Birek: Just the way you said it, because you said whether it’s normal or if it’s my body deteriorating and then the next thing you said is, “And it is,” so I thought maybe it could be either.

Shanna Micko: It was a pronoun.

Laura Birek: Yes, that sounds right to me.

Shanna Micko: I’m sure it’ll happen more often. The bigger I get then the more weight and pressure that’s put down there. That’s why you got to do your kegels. That’s what I learned too.

Laura Birek: Is it kegels or kegels? I always thought it was kegels.

Shanna Micko: I’ve heard both, but I’ve always said kegels.

Laura Birek: Kegels is more fun. It’s got that sharp key sound to it. I’m going to start calling them kegels.

Shanna Micko: Apparently, that’ll help with that. I hope you never get there. You have a bladder of steel.

Laura Birek: Oh God, I just jinxed it. I don’t know if it’s a bladder of steel. It’s just large, so maybe it’ll be worse. Maybe when I sneeze, there will be a deluge on the downside.

Shanna Micko: It was just a small trickle when it happened with me. It’s not like there was any Niagara Falls going on or anything.

Laura Birek: Was it at work or at home?

Shanna Micko: Oh, no. It was at home.

Laura Birek: Good, because that’s a harder situation.

Shanna Micko: Anyways, there’s my shame. What about you? What did you Google?

Laura Birek: I actually have a whole long list and I’m just going to go through them real quick and I’ll just stop.

Shanna Micko: That’s fun.

Laura Birek: But you’ll sense a theme. Ready? What I Googled: Hawaiian Snapper mercury, mahi-mahi mercury, Ahi fish mercury, Ono mercury. Basically, I was looking at my history and it’s one after another, trying to figure out what fish I could eat in Hawaii and not give my baby low IQ from mercury poisoning.

Shanna Micko: What did you discover?

Laura Birek: What I discovered is a bummer basically. I knew some basics. I knew that the smaller the fish, the less mercury most likely. That’s sort of a general good rule.

Shanna Micko: Sardines for the win.

Laura Birek: Exactly. But do you know what the size of a mahi-mahi is? I don’t.

Shanna Micko: No.

Laura Birek: Only like a filet. I don’t know what it looks like swimming in the ocean. In Hawaii, they have all these fish that have Hawaiian names and so then you have to first figure out what the non-Hawaiian name is and then figure out if it’s like, Ahi and Ono. You have to figure out what they actually are, what their equivalent is, and then figure out if there’s mercury, because those aren’t listed in the FDA’s list or whatever, or the Ocean Safe List. What I found out was tuna is basically the worst, because they’re huge. Swordfish Tuna, tilefish, those are really very high in mercury. Mahi-mahi apparently was sort of in the medium range. There was one that was okay. I think, Ono was also in the medium range. But basically what I figured out was most people recommend you limit your consumption and so I realized I basically could have two servings of mahi-mahi while I was in Hawaii for a whole week. So I had to plan it basically and it was a bummer, because there’s so much good fresh fish there and you just want to eat it all, but it seems to be a consensus that mercury is not great and that it builds up. It’s one of those things too, where I think I was willfully ignoring mercury content in fish as a non-pregnant person. I would go get sushi and be like, whatever, it’s fine. But now that I’ve been doing all this research, I’m like, fuck. It’s not just during pregnancy that I should only have mahi-mahi once a week. It’s like all the time.

Shanna Micko: I got to say though, I don’t eat fish very much. I like it and I like sushi, but I probably have fish and/or sushi maybe once a week. Are you a big fish person?

Laura Birek: In Hawaii, I was. 

No, I think once a week is usually pretty typical for me on a normal time and there’s something like salmon, you could have basically as much as you want according to the guidelines.

Shanna Micko: But it’s a lot.

Laura Birek: I love a tuna salad sandwich. I love a tuna melt and tuna is one of the worst. There’s mixed guideline. Everything is all so wishy washy, right? Some people say that Aku is bad, but Chunk Light Tuna is fine and some people say that’s not true that all tuna is bad and then some people say mercury is not even that big of a deal. I think that book, Expecting Better, said that if you were to eat a lot of high mercury fish, it might lower your child’s IQ by two points. So it’s unclear exactly how bad it is, but it’s one of those things where it’s like, well, I just can’t justify. When you know the information and you know that it’s bad, you just don’t know how much it is. Then I guess I just I’m going to eat something else, you know?

Shanna Micko: There’s other delicious food choices.

Laura Birek: There are many, many delicious food choices. Anyway, so that was what I Googled: every single type of fish you can imagine plus mercury.

Shanna Micko: You’re being a very careful, mama. Good job.

Laura Birek: Thank you.

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Shanna Micko: Let’s move on to our BFPs and BFNs. Laura, what do you got for us this week?

Laura Birek: Okay. I have been struggling with finding a good prenatal vitamin. I’m mostly out of my nausea with my morning sickness, my all day sickness, but I still have little bouts of it in Hawaii. It was sort of coming and going and so one of the big triggers of it was the massive horse pills I had to take for my prenatal vitamins and I couldn’t deal with taking them anymore and it could have just become an aversion. It’s possible that the brand I had was fine, but it became a massive aversion for me. So when I was in Hawaii, I actually bought a couple different kinds of prenatal vitamins, trying to find what I liked and so I have a BFP, because my big fat positive this week is that I finally found a prenatal vitamin I can handle.

Shanna Micko: Ooh.

Laura Birek: I think you’re the one who recommended this to me. You told me to get the gummies.

Shanna Micko: I was going to say, you got to go gummy.

Laura Birek: I finally found a gummy. I got the One A Day Prenatal Care Gummies, whatever they’re called and then I realized there’s no iron in them. So I just take an iron supplement separately.

Shanna Micko: Oh, good idea. Those are small.

Laura Birek: They’re like small. They don’t have any smell. They’re super easy to take. The thing is I’ve always been really good at taking meds. I have no problem taking pills, taking even big pills, but there was just something. The kind that I was originally using a friend had recommended and they looked gray and they probably are really good for you. They’re all organic and derived from the best plant materials and blah, blah, blah. But they were gigantic horse pills and they weren’t like coated, so if you had them on your tongue for more than a second, they started dissolving a little bit. They had like a fishy smell. It’s making me feel sick.

Shanna Micko: Gross.

Laura Birek: I just have to say, if you are struggling with this like I was, just get the damn gummies and just look and see my gummies don’t have a lot of calcium, because I think there’s certain things that make gummies taste bad or they’re hard to put into gummy form. If I find out I don’t have a ton of calcium or any iron, I supplement with iron and the truth is that I have such bad heartburn and I take Tums like they are candy all day. I get plenty of calcium that way. That’s how I’m doing it and I’m very happy.

Shanna Micko: That sounds like a good combo. I’m so glad. I did gummies the whole first trimester and then I ran out and I had like some old horse pills left over from before and I was like, I guess I’ll just start taking these and now that I’m in my second trimester, I’m fine with the big horse pills. I’m back on them. It’s fine I’ll just use those, but it’s fun gummies too, because it’s kind of like a candy treat.

Laura Birek: Yeah.

Shanna Micko: They appeal to the kid in me.

Laura Birek: I agree and I take mine at night now too, so that kind of helped. But it’s like a treat at the end of the day. I don’t dread taking them, which is nice. Anyway, what do you have for us? You got a BFP or BFN?

Shanna Micko: I have a BFN this week. It’s not really a big deal. It’s just a struggle. I am having a lot of difficulty with nursery inspiration. For my first daughter, I was so excited to do her nursery and my favorite colors, I put together in a combo. I love her color combo and found like wall decals and had all this energy to paint and I painted a dresser and I was just so into it. This one I’m coming up blank even on ideas of what to do I think, because my daughter’s color combo was a teal, turquoise kind of color, like a blue and a very vibrant pink and white and then with gray accents and I just love it. I see that color combo and it makes me so happy and I can’t think of any other color combos that I like, like what other colors do you do for a little girl? I’m just not into purple.

Laura Birek: Is there a reason it needs to be different?

Shanna Micko: I think just for my own neurosis, I don’t want it to be the same. I think it will bother me if it’s the same. I can use some of the similar colors in there. My daughter has whole accent walls that are the teal and I don’t want to mirror that in the room. Also for my creative side, I want to feel inspired to do something different and fun and cute.

Laura Birek: I’m going to send you this thing I use when I’m designing for webpages and in general when I’m looking for color inspiration. It’s a color palette generator.

Shanna Micko: Send it to me.

Laura Birek: I’m going to send that to you and the cool thing about it is that if you find a color you like, you can lock it and I think the color’s full screen next to each other. If you find a color or two that you like, you lock those and those will stay on your screen and then you can just keep hitting refresh and there’s all these little things you can set to try to tweak them, but it’s pretty cool. I’m going to send that to you.

Shanna Micko: Oh, that’s fun. Is it like a website link we could share with our listeners too?

Laura Birek: Yeah, I’ll be sure to put it in the show notes. If you go to bigfatpositivepodcast.com, it will be there. It’s fun and it’s very aesthetically pleasing and I really like it and I’m sure there’s some color theory behind it: why they generate the colors they generate.

Shanna Micko: Ooh, fun. Hopefully, I’ll be on my way soon, because I love looking at stuff on Pinterest and pinning boards and I just love going down that rabbit hole and I’m just feeling uninspired right now and kind of bummed, so maybe you’ll give me a kick start.

Laura Birek: You got a lot of time.

Shanna Micko: In theory. But it’s like I work during the week and I only have so many weekends left to think and plan and get ready and I just feel like the clock is really ticking on me. I’m getting nervous.

Laura Birek: Oh, man. Here’s the other thing. If your daughter ends up in a room that is not a Pinterest worthy room, she will still be a happy baby.

Shanna Micko: I hope so. I don’t know if that’s the truth, Laura.

Laura Birek: I haven’t even really thought about it, because we live in a two bedroom house and the second bedroom right now is my office. So I can’t really do much to the office, future nursery, because I need my office. I haven’t even crossed that bridge. I haven’t even thought about that, so you’re ahead of me.

Shanna Micko: It’s true when they’re newborn, at least I did with my daughter: had her in the bassinet in our room for a couple months anyway. So there’s extra time.

Laura Birek: You’ve got lots of time. Having seen what you came up with for your first daughter, I know that your second daughter is going to have an adorable room that we will all be jealous of.

Shanna Micko: Thank you for the vote of confidence. I appreciate it.

Laura Birek: Anytime, friend. I think that’s our show.

Shanna Micko: That’s it for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to tell us what you Googled this week or your BFPs or BFNs, be sure to visit us on social media. Laura, where can our listeners find us?

Laura Birek: We have a website, bigfatpositivepodcast.com. We’re on Instagram and Twitter at BFP Podcast. We’re also on Facebook. We have a community page for Big Fat Positive Podcast. That’s where you can find us.

Shanna Micko: Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and rate and review. Big Fat Positive is produced by Shanna Micko, Laura Birek and Steve Yager.

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