​When we first started this podcast, we knew we were making something special. Something for a niche community: Latina moms, from a certain generation, who also happen to listen to podcasts. Along the way though, we’ve realized that while we are creating a product for a niche community, it can be consumed by everyone because no matter who you are, or where you come from, the truth is that motherhood and the topics related to it, are universal. Plus, you know what else is universal? Laughter and friendship. And if you’ve listened to our podcast at all, you know that these two things are at the core.
 
Alex and I make a pretty good team. We have danced together, played together and now embarked on learning an entirely new industry, and all of the skills that go with it together. It has been an exhausting and at once exciting endeavor. Exhausting because learning to do something new always is. Exciting because the response, while not representing an exorbitant number, has been a wave of love and positivity, which in the end is the greater sum. We laugh a lot and since we did not set out to create comedy, in fact, we intended well researched, informative and fun, we had no idea that the most repeated comment would be that listeners laugh along with us.
 
The laughter and the shared experience of momming while Latina has resonated with our very special niche community and we are so thankful. You know how they say you learn to be a mom with your first born child? Well, we learned to be mom podcasters with Season 1. And you know how they say by the second child you get it right? Well, same. See you for Season 2! Launch date to be announced.

And as always, would love to hear from you!
XO,
​Wendy

​Kids require an enormous amount of equipment. You have all the gear for sleeping, feeding, transporting, dressing, cleaning and entertaining. Because kids grow so fast, once you are in the never-ending loop of kid stuff, you are kind of stuck in it until they are independent.
 
It begins with the baby shower. I don’t really know how long the baby shower tradition as we know it has been around, but it is all dumb in my opinion. The only part of the modern day baby shower that I think is genius, is the registering for gifts part and making the guests buy you things from this list. Honestly, without this guided list, my baby would have been born and I would not have had any of the necessary items needed for taking care of a baby. First of all I hate shopping and at that point in my life, I had never been around babies so I really didn’t understand all of the gear that would be needed. I was very fortunate. I got everything on my baby registry and then some.
 
And then the baby, (babies now), kept getting more stuff from well meaning family and friends, who are so lovely and just want to support and bring joy to these children, until the accumulation of kid stuff started taking over the house and one day, I woke up and it looked like a Toys r Us and a Gap Baby had exploded in my house. I was pretty good for a long time about keeping most kid things at bay, but then I had a second baby and now we have kid stuff in every room and it truly stresses me out. I am by no means a hoarder. The opposite in fact. I am constantly donating and getting rid of stuff and still, more stuff just appears.
 
I don’t think I had that much stuff growing up. No, I know that I didn't have that much stuff growing up. This is probably why I also don’t think that much stuff is necessary.

I am two kids in and the most useful items have been:

• A high chair, the plastic most basic high chair from Ikea because it is easy to keep clean.
• A swing, again the most basic model, I don’t even put batteries in it for it to rock or vibrate itself.
• Swaddle with the Velcro, no need to learn to do a proper swaddle again
• A stroller, but only before they can walk. Fancy is not necessary. 
• A baby carrier so that you can be hands free.
• Spill proof sippy cups.
• Sound machine but now that comes as an app on the phone and it's free.

 
Most useless

• The crib.
• Pipi teepee for boys.
• Baby wipes warmer. It's just not that cold in CA.
• Bottle steamer. Just use the dish washer or boil them in a pot of hot water.
• Baby food maker. Just use your food processor or blender, microwave or steamer. 

Honestly, the useless list can go on and on, but that's just me. I just don't like having that much stuff. 

How do you keep the kid's stuff from taking over your house?
What items have you found to be the most useful? Which were the least useful?

Would love to hear from you!
XO,
​Wendy

Mother’s Day is this weekend and we thought that it would be interesting to discuss the complexities of the mother daughter relationship. Then, we actually thought about it and decided that maybe therapy should come first before we let ourselves fall deep into the emotional well, that is our own relationships with our mothers. I mean, really, we started this podcast as a creative way to talk shit about our mothers and the way they parented us. It was to be a converter of sad and traumatic events into comedy. We are only 20 episodes in, and while we are no longer just talking shit about our mothers, we are definitely not in a place to really delve into our mommy issues.
 
So… I poured us a cocktail and we decided to watch Bad Moms instead. Alex had never seen it and I really did not remember it. We laughed. Alex cried. We loved the moral of the story. Basically, this movie reminds us that we are all “bad moms.” The perfect mom is an unattainable illusion. The expectations placed on mothers are ridiculous. If we buy into these ideals of what motherhood is supposed to look like, we will never be good enough and always be unhappy.
 
Let’s face it, this whole model of perfection and unrealistic expectations is placed in all the roles inherent to women. We are supposed to be perfect at everything, our jobs, our relationships, at home, as mothers, and look perfect while doing it all and having it all.
 
After watching the movie and grazing the surface on some of the mommy issues that came up for us while we watched, we concluded that on mother’s day, along with accepting presents and praise, we should also practice a little bit of self-love. Let’s  practice being nicer to ourselves. Let’s practice being patient with ourselves. Let’s allow ourselves to make mistakes and not be perfect. Let’s allow the “bad mom” in us all to emerge, show us how to have fun again and put the “priorities” into perspective. We are so, so, hard on ourselves. Let Mother’s Day be the beginning of a newer and kinder relationship with ourselves.

How will you celebrate Mother's Day?
How will you practice being kinder and more patient with yourself?

Would love to hear from you!
XO,
Wendy

​When I was pregnant for the first time the advice that I received the most was to get sleep because I was never going to sleep again. I was already a mom to two fur babies who woke me up constantly in the middle of the night so I didn’t really take this advice too seriously. And the thing is that no matter what advice you get, what books you read, what mother adjacent experience you may have had, nothing can prepare you for the realities of becoming a first time mom. It is just impossible to comprehend until you live it and see how your body, your mind and I dare say your soul, will react. It is an intense and difficult transition and it is all encompassing especially at the very beginning, so it isn’t until you kind of feel like you have the hang of it, that you can even recall who you were before you became a mom.
 
I am deep into motherhood. Almost 6 years and 2 kids later, and I am seeing the fog lift. I used to be someone totally different. I loved that person. I loved that life. I miss her sometimes. I’m on team hashtag no regrets over here because becoming a mother was all part of the plan, but hey, I’m only human. Of course I miss some of the things that I took for granted before having kids.
 
Here is a list in no particular order:
​
1. Real uninterrupted sleep and sleeping in till whenever I wanted on the weekends.
2. Loud crazy sex. I co-sleep and this is no longer an option unless I want to wake up and scare the baby…
3. Eating leisurely and not having to think about cooking various meals to accommodate the kid’s picky eating habits of the week.
4. Being able to be spontaneous. Freedom! Only answering to myself!
5. Going out to adult places and doing adult activities. I get to do this sometime, but not very much. We always have to accommodate the kids.
6. Watching adult TV and movies. Kiss anything rater R or PG-13 even goodbye. I didn’t sleep train so my kids are watching whatever I watch. I know, my bad.
7. Just being me and my husband in the house. The quiet, the solitude, the just-the-two-of-us-ness of it.
8. Being able to wear whatever I want and staying clean throughout the day. Kids are gross is all I’m saying.
9. Getting ready leisurely. I’m the last to get ready and by then I’m stressed and flustered.
10. Quiet time to binge read a book. Quiet in general. Oh, the constant talking sometimes kills me!
11. Being uninterrupted. I. Literally. Cannot. Finish. A. Sentence.
12. The luxury of only having to think about myself. This!
13. The luxury of wasting time. If I had only known then what I know now. Sigh.
 
Moral of the story is, life changes when you have a kid. (Duh) You will never know how it will change you for better or worse, until you experience it. Good luck out there first time mommas!

What are some of the things you miss from your pre-mom days?
Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your pre-mom self?

Would love to hear from you!
XO,
Wendy

​One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was make mom friends. I am being very deliberate about not just saying friends, because a mom friend is very specific. A mom friend is someone you can go through motherhood with. A mom friend is an ally, a confidant, an ear, and a fellow soldier in the trenches.
I was one of the first to have a baby in my friend circle. I knew nothing about babies, or baby things. Out of sheer luck, a childhood friend, who had already had a baby, moved back to our hometown, where I still lived, and she walked me through what it felt like to be a mother. She drove me to the big box baby store and showed me all of the things that I would need. She helped me to understand the vast transition that I was about to go through. And even with her being so kind, generous of her time and thorough, I still was not prepared for what motherhood would feel like to me.
Not gonna lie, this transition was rough. My son came into the world via emergency c-section, he was 2 weeks old when we move to another county, my husband started a new job, my parents moved in with us, being a first time mom was not what I was expecting and I for sure had postpartum depression. We went through a huge upheaval in our lives. I was suddenly in a new place, living another life and had no friends.
I don’t know how I managed to do this, but I gave myself a mission: to find mom friends. I joined every mom group I could find nearby. I went to every parent and child class that I could attend. I saw other moms, saw how they interacted with their babies, and I talked and asked a ton of questions. These groups helped me become more comfortable in my role as a mother, helped me feel more comfortable in my new community, helped our new multigenerational family become better acclimated.
These groups were a blessing. And while I did not make the type of mom friends that I was looking for at that time, you know, the fellow Mamacitas that would day drink with me at the park while we shit talked about the crazy things our kids did, the groups were a wonderful resource.
My son is almost 6 and I have a second child now. My close friends did eventually start having kids and I did eventually find a mom friend group in my new community. My world has grown immensely. And while I have always said that I am not good at making new friends, I proved to myself during one of the hardest times in my life, that I can. That I could. That I did. 

What was your experience making mom friends?
Do you think having mom friends is important?
What do you think the benefits of having a mom friend group have been for you?

Would love to hear from you!
XO,
Wendy

My parents live in my house, down the hall, and did I ever imagine that this is how my life would be as an adult with a husband and a couple of kids? No. Is it hard sometimes? Yes. Would I change it? No. What most would call a “burden” has actually been a beautiful new beginning for my parents and I.
 
I moved out after I graduated from college, but it wasn’t because I found my own apartment and was ready to take on the world as an independent single professional. I left, because my house burned down. It was a cigarette left in the bedroom by my brother’s then crackhead girlfriend. And I’m not being mean, this is literal. She was a crackhead. My parents let her stay and supported her even after she burned down our house and so I never went back home. From the ashes of this tragedy I made my own sense of home, created my own family, and honestly it was a necessary and poetic rebirth for me as a young adult. My relationship with my parents already is distress though became pretty much non-existent. Through the years, we have slowly reconciled our relationship, but there was never a comfortable relationship to begin with so...
 
So why did my parents end up in my house? Well, because that is what family does. Regardless of the circumstances, family helps each other out.
 
And boy have my parents have helped me out. Their presence in my home has allowed me the freedom to work and to date my husband. I have built in babysitting for goodness sake! This is absolutely priceless. My parents are great playmates. They allow me to take a mom break if I need to shower, or just breathe for a second. The grandparent grandchild relationship is beautiful. I did not experience it first-hand but I am so thankful that my kids get to.
 
Is it hard to have my parents around all the time? Of course! No one wants to live with the judging eyes of their old school Latino parents. It’s getting easier. At first I felt like I was teenager again, rebelling and rolling my eyes every time my mom said something, especially regarding parenting. In my head I was always like “like how would you know! You were never there!” So yes, I have definitely had some issues to work through.
 
Not to mention that by having my parents in my home, I am the epitome of the sandwich generation. I take care of them and my kids and I’m sandwiched in between. It ends up feeling like I have four kids.
 
In Like Water for Chocolate- Como Agua Para Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, the main character is the youngest daughter and they talk about how it is her duty as the youngest to never marry and devote her life to taking care of her mother. I’m the youngest. I’m taking care of my mother. I’m totally fulfilling an outdated stereotype that should have never existed because, how horrible is it that you are born just to fulfill this duty? But I’m using it to my advantage.

My big generalization is that since the pandemic, more people are going to adopt this very traditional family structure and like it.
Would you ever create a multi-generational home on purpose?
Do you live in one?
What is your experience?
Would you recommend it?
Are you expected to take care of your parents because you’re the youngest daughter?

Would love to hear from you!
XO,
​Wendy

I love being pregnant. I feel healthy, strong and vibrant. I’m that mom that takes a weekly picture of her bump, publishes it as a pregnancy journal, and then prominently displays it on a shelf in the living room for anyone to look through. I love the changing, ever-growing bump and everything else it ripens with it. It’s getting the kid out of me that is problematic. I’ve had 2 c-sections and right after them, it feels like a death and a birth all at once. The person I was, the body I had inhabited is gone. The baby I hold in my arms and this new body that I share, granted, in a very awkward way, have to be nursed into being. The baby and my body change over the course of the year. Each becoming independent, beautiful, whole again.

My moms version of the sex talk was threatening me to not get pregnant or else, or calling me a whore when I came home too late in my very early 20’s and because of this, there were so many things I didn’t know. I read so much about parenting, a little about giving birth, and nothing regarding post birth. 

My big generalization for this week is that our mothers did not prepare us for any aspect of the birthing process because it was considered indecent and probably gross to speak about anything related to women’s bodies. It’s getting better, but women are still embarrassed to speak to each other candidly about these experiences.

What do you wish someone had told you about the postpartum experience?

I wish someone would have told me that having a baby was going to make me a better version of me. I’m stronger, more patient, kinder, more efficient, more determined.
 
Do you think motherhood has made you better?
Did your mother speak candidly to you about any aspect of the birth experience? Making the baby, housing the baby, birthing the baby, being with the baby?
 
Would love to hear from you!

XO,
​Wendy