Sara Buckley and her husband, Sterling, have been together since high school — and they can’t keep their hands off of each other.
”We’ll be married 19 years in November, and sex still comes easy to us,” Buckley, creator of the popular Instagram account Not the Worst Mom, tells TODAY.com. It’s a topic the couple, who shares three children, discusses regularly on their relationship podcast, “Not the Worst Marriage.” Both Buckley, 36, and Sterling, 39, believe the more sex you have, the more you'll want.
“I can’t think of another group of people that deserve great orgasms more than moms,” Buckley says. “But maintaining an active, healthy sex life when you have a job and kids climbing all over you, it takes a lot of intention.”
So in January 2021, the Las Vegas-based influencer set up a sex challenge for her quarter of a million Instagram followers.
“Wives, I challenge you for the next seven days … to actively pursue your husband sexually. Try to have sex four to five times in the next seven days,” Buckley began. She also encouraged listeners to send “dirty” text messages to their partners throughout the day, and to touch them more frequently.
Buckley then asked participants to report back on what they experienced. One by one, the messages started rolling in.
“They were so much fun to read. It was like, ‘I’ve been wanting him to hang curtains for the last four months and he finally got up early Saturday and did it,’” Buckley says. “I also had husbands reaching out to thank me!”
A few people joked that Buckley’s challenge was going to result in unintended pregnancies.
“I remember laughing, but I didn’t think much of it,” Buckley says.
Two months later, she started receiving photos of positive pregnancy tests.
“Dozens and dozens of them,” Buckley recalls. And they kept coming.
She guesses that the challenge birthed somewhere around 150 babies, including a “crazy amount” of twins, based on adding up DMs and comments from followers on her social accounts. The babies are now known as “Sara’s Tots," and Buckley has an entire highlight reel dedicated to them on her Instagram.
"My Sara's tot is turning 2 in a month. He's lovely and the perfect addition to my crew! But it's safe to say daily sex has slowed down a bit until hubby's vasectomy in November," one person wrote.
A mom in Australia shared a photo of positive pregnancy test and wrote that Buckley is "responsible for increasing sex and pregnancies all around the world!"
Ginelle Powell-Fulton’s 2-year-old son, Michael, is another one of Sara’s Tots. Powell-Fulton, 33, took the challenge after experiencing a miscarriage.
“We’d recently lost a pregnancy and it was hard for me to want to be intimate after going through that,” Powell-Fulton tells TODAY.com. “So when Sara put the challenge out there, I decided to give it a try. I respond well to challenges."
Powell-Fulton and her husband, Kent Fulton, welcomed their second child, a healthy baby boy, in June 2021.
“Doctors were saying, ‘Listen, you guys probably aren’t going to be able to conceive naturally, you’ll likely need some sort of intervention,’” Powell-Fulton says. “And then we got pregnant naturally.”
Buckley’s challenge made sex fun again, Powell-Fulton says.
“We were thinking about getting pregnant, it was just about us connecting,” she explains, “and I think that really helped.”
Buckley agrees.
“I’m not a doctor but it does seem that when people stop putting pressure on themselves — that’s when it happens,” she says. “I’ve gotten so many DMs from women saying, ‘When we decided to have sex again just for us, we finally got pregnant.”