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4th September 2025
10:00am BST
Brought to you by Dairylea
The second episode of Mother, our flagship parenting podcast sponsored by Dairylea, has just landed, and we were chuffed to welcome a seriously impressive Irish athlete into the studio.
Shauna Bannon is a highly skilled athlete, with a huge number of MMA, kickboxing and Jiu-Jitsu titles under her belt. On top of her fighting prowess, Shauna is also the proud mum to Jayce, her miracle baby.
On the episode, Shauna tells our seasoned host Keelin Moncrieff all about her journey with pregnancy, which came as a bit of a surprise, due to the fact that she only has one ovary and one fallopian tube. The complications didn't just end there, as Shauna explains. The fighter had issues with her placenta which resulted in Jayce being born early, weighing just five pounds and with a tongue tie.
Shauna immediately rose to these challenges. Her instinct to feed her baby, and do everything she could to help him gain the weight he needed made her feel like a mother straight away, even though motherhood was not always something she envisioned for herself.
As she tells Keelin on the pod, a switch was clicked when a friend of hers had a child of her own. Flash forward a number of years, Shauna has her miracle baby, and cannot imagine life without him.
Motherhood, as any mum will tell you, is not without its challenges, and Shauna is not one to shy away from the trickier aspects of parenting. On this week's pod, she shares the biggest fears she has as a mother, and how she is never able to shake the fear that something bad will happen - something a lot of parents will be able to relate to.
Later this episode, Shauna looks back at her own childhood as a tomboy, shares why every child should learn self-defence and explains why her father is her ultimate role model.
You can listen to the latest episode of Mother wherever you get your podcasts today.
