Busy Philipps ‘Can’t Blame’ Birdie for Love of Princesses
 Courtesy Mom |
Cougar Town actress Busy Philipps is no pushover when it comes to raising daughter Birdie Leigh, 23 months — but even she has a breaking point!
“I’m sort of like a hippie, and I really tried with the carved wooden blocks and the organic toys and the non-toxic, not-made-in-China things,” she reveals in the summer issue of Mom.
“Then at a certain point, Birdie came home from the park and she wanted Ariel and she wanted Cinderella.”
After admitting “I kind of love that stuff, too,” Philipps says she eased her stance on princess culture. “I can’t blame her,” she adds. “You do the best that you can.”
That outlook was readily apparent during Birdie’s birth. Pointing out that she gained 80 lbs. during her pregnancy, Philipps paid the ultimate price on delivery day when Birdie turned out to be “a huge kid” who required three hours of pushing to make her grand entrance.
“Toward the end — no joke — I had full-on hallucinations in between pushing,” says Philipps, who opted for an unmedicated birth. “It was crazy! And as she came out, the doctor got her head and her shoulders out — there’s nothing like that pain in the whole world: It’s white hot.”
Afterward, Philipps, 31, says her recovery was minimal — “I never even took a Tylenol,” she shares — but there were still obstacles to overcome. “I had to lose those 80 pounds,” she laments, “and that was hard.”
There were also growing pains within her marriage to writer/producer Marc Silverstein. The couple are “a really good team” when one-on-one, Philipps explains, but “throwing the baby into the mix is tricky.”
“I think that so many people aren’t honest about what actually happens when you have a child,” she adds. “Once you start opening up to girlfriends, then you realize everyone’s sort of going through the same thing. Marc and I really had to work on co-parenting and how we work together.”
To that end, the couple carve out alone time each night from 7:30 to 11 p.m., once their daughter has gone to bed. “Marc and I want to hang out with each other and do whatever it is that we want to do,” Philipps says. “It’s really important for us to sit there and watch Lost together.”
