Okay, real talk. Nobody warns you about the exact moment a nurse hands you your baby, smiles, and says “let’s try feeding” — while you’re still numb from the ribs down and terrified to laugh, cough, or sneeze because it feels like your stitches might pop. That was me, hour six after my second C-section,
I still remember buckling my daughter into her car seat for the ride home from the NICU and thinking, somewhat irrationally, “Wait, they’re just letting us leave?” She was five pounds, two ounces. I’d spent 26 days learning her feeding schedule from nurses who could read her cues better than I could read a stop
3:47 a.m. I know it was exactly that time because I remember glancing at the microwave clock in the kitchen, bottle warming, my son Eli screaming like the world was ending. Twelve minutes earlier he’d been dead asleep. Now I was standing there in a stained t-shirt, doing math in my head — wait, didn’t
My youngest turned six months old on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I had a high chair, a bib shaped like a strawberry, and a container of mashed banana I’d made with entirely too much ceremony. She looked at the spoon, looked at me, and turned her head so fast I nearly got banana on
My son was eleven days old the first time I cried over a spreadsheet. Not a work spreadsheet — a sleep log, color-coded, because some sadist on a parenting forum told me tracking would “reveal patterns.” It revealed nothing except that he slept for forty-one minutes, then ninety-three minutes, then nineteen minutes, in an order
