Nicole Sullivan Says Dash Hams it Up For Audience
 Fame |
The drawbacks to life as a celebrity mom are well documented, but actress Nicole Sullivan takes it all in stride. Although she often works longer hours than most she still feels that being on a sitcom is “the best job in the world to have when you’re a mom.” Not only does the 38-year-old actress enjoy lengthy hiatuses from the set of Lifetime’s Rita Rocks, her job is “really very convenient” when it comes to caring for her 20-month-old son Dashel ‘Dash’ Pierce. “He comes almost every day for lunch and hangs out with me for half an hour,” Nicole shares.
“He’s adorable…he wanders around, he loves playing with the dog toys on the set, he knows everyone’s name — he’s just a ham already. He comes every tape night, and when they introduce the cast I always take him out with me, and he loves when the crowd starts applauding – he laughs back at them. He thinks it’s hilarious.”
Nicole adds although she feels “sad a lot of times about missing time with him,” she and husband Jason Packham — who employ a full-time nanny — are “paying a mortgage on a house with a pool,” which is something Dash will be “really stoked about in a few years.” You also won’t catch Nicole complaining about the paparazzi. “I think it’s hilarious,” she explains. “I guess if I were really famous and had paparazzi around me all the time, I’d be irritated by it. But I just always like getting pictures of my kid.”
“I love seeing him in magazines, ‘Look how cute he looks there!’ So it doesn’t bother me one iota. The paparazzi, in as little as they bother me — which is very, very little — I always find entertaining. I find them perfectly polite and fine, and they’re gone within 5 minutes, so it’s never an issue.”
Click below to read about Nicole’s parenting philosophy.
Losing the baby weight was “really brutal,” and unlike many women Nicole reveals that breastfeeding wasn’t the key to reclaiming her pre-baby body. “It was the opposite of every famous person who’s like ‘I’m breastfeeding, that’s why I’m a size zero again,’” she admits. “I’m like, I breastfed for six months and I wasn’t a size zero!” Once she weaned Nicole says she was able to begin a weight loss regimen in earnest, however. “It wasn’t until I stopped breastfeeding that I was able to diet because before that I couldn’t find a way to diet where I felt like I was getting enough food and nutrients to give him what he needed,” she says. “Hopefully if I have another kid I’ll figure it out better the second time.”
“But the first time, it was really difficult for me – it did not come off easily. I’m back to the same weight I was before, but it doesn’t look the same, if you know what I’m saying. It hangs differently.”
There was no hiding Nicole’s pregnancy as she shot the Jeff Goldbum show Rain. “That doesn’t fly with me,” Nicole says. “You see it in every part of my body.” Fortunately — at the time — she remained “blissfully unaware” of how “ridiculous” she looked. “You know, you think you’re really thin, and then you look back and go, ‘Oh my god, look at that face!’”
Baby boy was named after Dashiell Hammett, one of Nicole’s favorite authors. “I just really liked the name; I thought it was kind of cool,” Nicole says. “My husband and I call him Dash – that’s his nickname.” The couple are “very much on the same page” when it comes to parenting philosophies and admit that they often “make it up” as they go along. “That’s item number one on my list of how to parent – clearly none of us know what we’re doing,” Nicole jokes.
“But we are really not overprotective. If he falls down, he’ll get back up. If he eats food off the floor, good for you… he got to it first; he beat the dog to it… awesome. We keep him safe, but just after keeping him safe we let life happen to him because it’s not about following him around with a net making sure he never bumps his head. He’s going to bump his head – he’s a boy.”
Instead, Nicole and Jason “let [Dash] live his life” and Nicole says, as a result, ”he’s a tough kid.”
“He handles things really well and he doesn’t freak out easily and I think that’s because we never freak out about stuff. Well, we do, but not when he’s looking!”
Source: The Cradle
