ria 
There’s a very specific kind of panic that hits at 3 a.m. when your baby is rooting around at your chest like you’ve personally betrayed them, and you’re doing math in your head — when did she last eat, how long was that side, was that even a real feed or just comfort sucking. I
Two in the morning, baby on my hip, and I was crying almost as hard as she was — because I could not, for the life of me, understand how something everyone kept calling “natural” was making me bleed. Nobody warns you about this part. Not the nurse who hands you home from the hospital
It’s 4:15 on a Tuesday. My son has asked for “the egg video” four times in the last ten minutes, and I’ve said no four times, and somewhere around the fifth ask my hand actually moved toward my back pocket before my brain caught up with it. That’s the moment that got me — not
It’s 4:47 on a Tuesday, dinner hasn’t started, and my son is standing in front of the TV asking for “one more Bluey” for the third time in an hour. I know the show isn’t hurting him. But I also know that if I say yes again, I’m going to feel weirdly guilty about it
My first pump was a hand-me-down from my sister, and I remember sitting on the edge of my bed at 2 a.m. with the manual open on my phone, trying to figure out which flange size I even needed, while doing frantic math about how many ounces I’d need to leave for daycare in six
My son was seven weeks old the first time he looked at a bottle like it had personally wronged him. My mother-in-law was visiting, she’d offered to take a shift so I could shower for longer than ninety seconds, and I came downstairs to find her pacing the living room with a screaming baby and
Somewhere around 1 a.m., I texted my sister a single line: “he’s eaten seven times since 8pm and I don’t know what’s happening to my body.” She wrote back “cluster feeding, welcome to hell, it ends,” and honestly, that four-word diagnosis did more for me than anything I’d read online. That was with my first.
Three hours after my second was born, a nurse handed her back to me, tapped the side of my breast like she was ringing a doorbell, and said, “okay, let’s try.” My daughter turned her head the wrong way, latched onto my thumb instead, and then just… fell asleep. Mid-attempt. I remember laughing because I
My second kid, Theo, was born at 8 lbs 1 oz — a solid, chunky baby by every measure. Two weeks later, at his checkup, he was down to 7 lbs 6 oz, and the pediatrician’s face did that thing where she’s trying to look neutral but you can tell she’s not. I remember sitting
I remember standing in my kitchen at 2 a.m. with my second baby screaming in one arm and a tub of formula in the other hand, feeling like I was about to fail some test nobody had actually given me. My supply had tanked that week — stress, a bad cold, who knows — and
