Hi friends! I’m so excited to have Sarah Merrill Hall on the show today! We’re talking about navigating postpartum, including C-section recovery, postpartum fitness, breastfeeding, and more.

135: Navigating postpartum with Sarah Merrill Hall

Here’s a bit more about Sarah:

Sarah grew an audience of over half a million Instagram followers by bringing humor and relatable content to everyday struggles. With a mission to help her followers embrace their imperfections, laugh through the hard times, and live their best kid lives, Sarah has turned Big Kid Problems into a relatable and infectious brand.

But her adulting content took a turn when Sarah became a new mom!

Enter the next era of Big Kid Problems: Bottle Service, a new kind of pregnancy and motherhood podcast. From recounting her ultimate C-section recovery guide to being open about her “failing” her breastfeeding journey, Bottle Service by Big Kid Problems is here to open up a new motherhood conversation.

You can check out her personal IG here, Big Kid Problems here, and listen to Bottle Service here. 

More resources from this episode:

I’m still obsessed with my sauna blanket (Memorial Day sale weekend of 5/26). This is one of my favorite ways to relax and sweat it out. I find that it energizes me, helps with aches and pains, I sleep better on the days I use this, and it makes my skin glow. Link to check it out here. You can also use my discount (FITNESSISTA15) for the PEMF Go Mat, which I use every day, and the red light face mask, which is a staple in m

Chocolate and toasted coconut stuffed inside chewy blondies, could any dessert possibly make me happier? For the moment, not a chance. These coconut cookie bars just plain make me happy.

Coconut Blondies

Oh, how I love blondie cookie bars. From classic chocolate chip blondies to fully loaded cookie bars with coconut and pecans, or a dark chocolate and cashew combination, there are endless ways to make a pan of blondies extra special.

Unless you are a coconut hater (completely inconceivable to me!), you are likely to adore these coconut blondies.

I typically cut these bars small, basically just so that I can keep going back into the kitchen for repeated tastings. Plus, they are pretty rich, so smaller servings work well with this recipe.

Blondies with Chocolate Chips

If you love bakery-style chocolate chip cookies with crisp edges and perfectly chewy centers (and you’re anything like me with less time on your hands with every passing day), these blondies with chocolate chips are likely to be made more often than those cookies we all love so much.

Blondies give you the crisp edges (especially the awesome edges pieces!) and the chewy centers of chocolate chip cookies, and they do it in less time with far less effort. No rolling or scooping is required, just stir the dough

Moist, sweet, and lightly spiced, this carrot cake with cream cheese frosting is the food of which sweet tooth dreams are made. 

Pioneer Woman Carrot Cake

For the longest time, years actually, I was on a hunt for the best carrot cake recipe. Carrot cake is one of Sean’s favorite cakes and I tried several cakes that were good, but they just didn’t measure up to our expectations. We both have a hard time resisting carrot cake anytime it is served, so the idea of making the perfect carrot cake at home was irresistible.

Then I found Ree Drummond’s carrot cake recipe and let me tell you, this baby measures up. I haven’t tried another recipe since I made this one for the first time over ten years ago. I make it at least once a year, sometimes more often than that.

This carrot cake is moist and sweet and incredibly flavorful. Classic carrot cake often includes pecans in the frosting, so I’ve listed them below as optional. (I rarely include nuts in my cakes and frostings, so I often skip them when making a cake just for my family to enjoy.)

Simple Carrot Cake

It shouldn’t come as news to any of you that I am not a cake decorator. Not even a little bit. My sister and I baked this cake one time when I was visiting her and while the word “rustic” covers a multitude of mistakes, it might be pushing it here.

When you’re spending time with your sister, laughing at your mistakes is way more fun than attempting to fix them.

As long as a cake is covered in frosting, I’m happy.

I’ve tried to force myself to care what a final cake looks like, but even for a pretty blog post, I’m just not that girl. (You can thank my sister Jenny for the fact that she added flowers to the cake the first time I photographed this cake and managed to make it presentable.)

My favorite cakes are almost always baked in sheet pans or flipped out of a bundt pan. Jenny and I doubled the recipe and made two generously sized cakes–a layered round cake and a bundt cake–to serve a ton of people.

The recipe as written below makes a cake that’s larg