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Two teeth in a week and she's a different child. Not worse, just... opinionated. Is this teething or is this just her now?

The days blur and I've decided that's fine. Toddler is obsessed with him now and that's its own hazard. To anyone reading this pregnant with their second and terrified: it's chaos, and it's fine, and both are true at once!

You asked for this back in March, the card for the people who mean well and keep saying 'sleep when the baby sleeps'. It's up now, along with a proper piece on what to say instead. Print it, send it, leave it somewhere passive-aggressive. I won't tell.

Read a post from March about crying on Tuesdays when the partner goes back to a full day. It's Thursdays for me but it's the same thing exactly. Mentioning it at my appointment because of that thread. Just wanted to say the archive here is doing real work.

Someone asked in April whether the logistics get easier. They do. Not because it changes, but because you stop apologizing for it. I put 'blocked' in the calendar with no explanation, like everyone said, and nobody has ever asked once.

The audit thread is still going and I'm working through every reply. Biggest gaps so far: overnight postpartum support almost everywhere, perinatal mental health outside cities, and lactation help in the Mountain West. That's my summer. Keep them coming.

It's 3am. I'm pumping. This is my MOTN session and I've done it every night since February, and I'm typing this one-handed with the Baby Buddha going, because if I don't say it now I'll lose my nerve by morning.

LO is 5 months. EP since week 3. I have never once fed her from my body and I've made my peace with that, mostly, at around 2pm on a good day!

Here's what my life is. Five pumps: 3am, 7am, 12, 4, 9pm. Twenty minutes each, plus setup, plus washing, call it 35 real minutes a session, so about three hours a day. I make 31 oz. She eats 28. I have 340 oz in a deep freezer in the garage that we bought FOR the milk. I have three sets of flanges, two pumps, a wearable for the car, a cooler bag, and a drying rack that lives on my counter permanently and that I hate with my whole chest!

I'm the person who tells everyone else which pump to buy! I have a note on my phone with duckbill valve replacement intervals. If you'd asked me in March I'd have said I'd go to a year, easy, I have the systems.

And I want to stop so badly that I sat in my car in the Target parking lot on Thursday and cried about it, and then went inside and bought more milk storage bags. Lol.

Nobody is making me do this. That's what I can't get past. My husband told me to quit in May. He said it kindly and I snapped at him. My mom told me to quit. My best friend, who formula fed both of hers and whose kids are fine, tall, happy, told me to quit. There is not one single person in my life on the other side of this argument. It's me. I'm the entire opposition!

So I'm not asking how to wean off the pump. I know how. Drop a session every few days, watch for clogs. I've read all of it, I could write it. I'm asking when YOU stopped. And I think, being honest at 3am, which is the only time I'm honest, I'm asking somebody to say a number smaller than a year out loud so I can hear it and not fall apart.

Because here's what I can't say in daylight: I don't like her as much when I'm pumping. When she's crying at 3am and I'm attached to a machine and can't pick her up, I resent a five month old. And then I hate myself. And then I do it again the next night. Three hours a day of a thing that's making me a worse mother, so that she can have the good milk, from the worse mother.

I have 340 oz in the garage. That's twelve days. Twelve whole days of being someone who can just pick her up.

When did you stop? Did the guilt go away? Please just tell me a number.

She flips herself onto her stomach the moment I put her down. I know the back-to-sleep rule. Nobody told me what to do when she has other ideas at 5 months. Do I flip her back all night forever??

Halfway through the year, mid-year audit time. Where did you look for someone and find nothing? Care type, city, both. I do this every few months and it's the single most useful thread we run. Last time it turned into 40 new providers in the Southeast.

Someone at a baby group said 'nursery water' like it was obvious and I nodded along and then googled it in the car. What else is everyone pretending to already know?

Everyone in my mom group is doing baby swimming and I can't tell if it's actually valuable or a very expensive way to get cold. Anyone done it and felt it was worth the hassle?

Same room, same routine, same everything. One goes down at 7 and sleeps. The other treats bedtime as a personal insult. At what point do we separate them, and does that ever work?

I need numbers. Not "it passes!" Not "every baby is different!" I know every baby is different, that's why I want a distribution instead of one anecdote.

So I'm going to give you mine in full and then I want yours, and I want it in days or weeks, plus how old your LO was in WEEKS when it started, because everybody says "4 months" and I'm now fairly sure "4 months" is doing a lot of lying.

Mine: born February 24, so she's 17 weeks today. Started May 28, which was 13 weeks and 3 days. That's the other reason I want your numbers, mine started at 13 weeks and I spent the first week convinced it was something else because she wasn't 4 months yet!

Before: she was doing 7 to 8 hours. I want that in writing because I have started to wonder whether I made it up. Down at 7:30, dream feed at 10:30, up once around 5. Naps were 45 minutes to an hour and a half, four of them. I was one of those insufferable people who thought she had an easy baby, and I would like to formally apologize to everyone I said that to!

Now, day 26: waking every 45 to 90 minutes MOTN. Every single one. Naps have collapsed into 28 minute cat naps. 28, not 30, it's uncanny, I've got a whole spreadsheet! Four to five naps. Wake windows 90-105 minutes and if I go over by ten minutes she's inconsolable. I dropped the dream feed on day 12 because someone said it might be the problem. It was not the problem.

Variables, so nobody has to ask: room 68F, blackout, white noise all night. Combo fed, mostly EBF with one bottle at night. No solids, not till 6 months per our pediatrician. Sleep sack over a swaddle, arms in, 1.0 TOG. Takes a pacifier and then loses it and screams about it. That's roughly 60% of the wakes. Not visibly teething, no drool, no fever. Leap 4 per Wonder Weeks lines up almost exactly, for whatever that's worth. I've decided that app is astrology for tired people but I still open it lol.

She rolled crib-to-back once, about two weeks ago, and hasn't done it since.

What I want from you:

1. How many days or weeks did it last, start to actually-over?

2. How old in WEEKS when it started?

3. Did it end, or did it just become the new baseline and you adjusted? Please be honest about this one! I think this is the real question and everyone dodges it.

4. Did anything you did shorten it, or do you just think it did because it ended eventually?

My husband asked me last night how much longer and I said I don't know and he said surely someone knows, and reader, I have been searching for eleven days and nobody knows. So I'm going to make a dataset. Give me yours!

Flipping the question. If you're a doula, IBCLC, PT or therapist listed here, what would actually help your practice? More visibility, a better profile, a way to show you're taking clients? I've been building for the moms and I want to get this side right too.

Given what I read here in January about four-minute appointments, I'd like to walk in with a list. What did you wish you'd asked, or what got brushed off that you had to chase later?

Six weeks in with a newborn and a 2yo. It is harder than one and easier than I feared, in that order. The toddler has finally acknowledged he exists! Ask me anything, I'm awake anyway.

You asked, it's live! Car seats on planes, the actual TSA milk rules with the paragraph you can point at, and the timing stuff, feeding on ascent and descent. Built almost entirely out of what you all said in May. Tell me what's wrong with it.

We've been winging it entirely and it's fine until it isn't. Is there a point where it's too late to introduce one, or can we just start on Monday like nothing happened?

Filing this under things I wish someone had said out loud, because I've now had two people tell me they did the same thing.

My LO is 5 months now. When she was born I had a vague plan to get newborn photos "at some point." I thought newborn meant, you know, a newborn! A small baby. I assumed I had a couple of months.

I emailed a photographer at five weeks and she wrote back very kindly and explained that the sleepy curled-up posed shots, the ones I had in my head, the ones I'd been picturing for months, basically only work in the first two weeks. After that they uncurl. They startle. They have opinions! She said she'd absolutely still shoot us and it would be beautiful, but it would be a different kind of session, and she wanted me to know that before I booked so I wasn't disappointed.

I sat there and cried about it, which in retrospect was about 30% photos and 70% five weeks postpartum.

But when exactly was I supposed to have booked that?! At two weeks I could not have told you what day it was. The window for booking the thing is inside the period where you are least capable of booking anything. That's a design problem and somebody should have warned me while I was still pregnant and bored and organizing things.

What I ended up doing: booked a lifestyle session at home at 7 weeks instead of a posed studio one. In-home, no props, she just followed us around for 90 minutes while we did nothing. $450 including digitals, which felt like a lot and now feels like nothing. There's one of my husband asleep on the couch with her on his chest that I will have until I die.

So, two questions, and I want the boring specifics.

When did you book, and when did you shoot? If you got the posed newborn ones, when did you actually reach out?

Studio or in-home? And did you use the hospital's photographer? I keep hearing mixed things about those and I'd like to know before I go recommending anything to anyone.

Everyone talks about sadness. Nobody mentioned the flashes of pure rage over the dishwasher being loaded wrong. It passes in ten minutes and then I feel awful. Is this a known thing or just me?

Every single page I open says "doulas typically cost between $800 and $2,500" and then nothing else. That is not a number! That is a shrug with a dollar sign on it.

So I'm asking here instead. I'm 24 weeks with my second, I have a 2.5 year old, and I did not have a doula the first time because I assumed we couldn't afford one. I never asked. I want to actually ask this time.

What I've worked out so far, and please correct me, because I have been at this for two weeks and I still feel stupid:

There are apparently three different jobs and they all get called "doula" and they do not cost the same thing. A birth doula is with you for labor. A postpartum doula comes to your house afterward and does... what, exactly? A night doula does nights. I emailed one person asking about "doula rates" and she wrote back asking which kind and I couldn't answer her. I have a graduate degree and I could not answer her!

The first quote I got was $2,400 and I closed the laptop and didn't open it for four days! I don't know if that's a normal number or a Denver number or a she-doesn't-really-want-the-job number.

So, specifically:

What did you pay? An actual figure. Your city or at least whether you're metro or not.

Birth or postpartum? And if postpartum, how many hours, over how many weeks? Because $35 an hour sounds fine until you realize you don't know how many hours anyone actually books.

What was in it? Does a birth doula charge for the prenatal visits separately, is there an on-call fee, does she stay after? Nobody's website says.

Did insurance pay any of it? I keep seeing that some states make them cover it now and I cannot work out if mine is one.

And the question I actually care about, which I'm slightly embarrassed to type: is there a cheap version? Not a bad version. A cheap one. Because we have a toddler in daycare and the honest answer is that $2,400 is not sitting in an account waiting, and if the real answer is "it costs what it costs" then fine, I'd rather know that now than keep opening the laptop and closing it.

My mother in law said "in my day you just had your sister." My sister lives in Ohio and has three kids. That's the whole problem, isn't it.

Not general therapists. People who specifically work with perinatal mood and anxiety. It's the request I get most that I can help with least. If you've seen someone who understood it, please send them to me. This one matters.

My baby's one and I have four thousand photos and none of me in them. Just realized I'm not in a single picture from the first year. Did anyone actually book a proper shoot, and was it worth it?

Fourteen weeks. That's how long this took. I'm writing it all down because I could not find this anywhere when I was in it, and if one person copies this and skips even four of those weeks it was worth typing.

Background: baby's six months, I'm in Tucson, back at work since April. I saw an IBCLC twice. Once at three weeks when my daughter wasn't transferring, once at six weeks for a pumping plan before I went back. $300 each. She's cash-pay. Most of them are, on purpose, which I did not understand at the time. She gave me a superbill.

The ACA says lactation support and counseling is preventive care. Zero cost share. No deductible. It's not a nice thing my plan does, it's required.

Round 1, denied. Submitted February 12. Denied March 3. Reason code 242, "services not provided by network/primary care providers." So: out of network, eat it.

The phone call that changed everything. I called Cigna and said: fine, give me the name of an in-network IBCLC within 30 miles of my zip code. Not a list of hospitals. A name.

She gave me four. I called all four. One was a hospital lab. A LAB! Two were OB practices where the front desk had never heard the word IBCLC and one of them offered to transfer me to billing. The fourth was a disconnected number. I wrote down all four names, the date, the time, and what each one said, verbatim, in a Google Doc. That doc is the reason I got paid.

Round 2, the superbill was wrong. My IBCLC's original superbill had only S9443 on it, a lactation class code, and Cigna's rep literally said "that's educational, that's not a covered medical service." She reissued it with diagnosis code Z39.1 (encounter for care and examination of lactating mother) and CPT 99404 for the counseling. Denied again March 20, but for a different reason, and I decided to read that as progress.

Round 3, the appeal. This is what worked. I used the NWLC Breastfeeding Toolkit template letter, which is free and which I wish somebody had put in my hospital discharge folder. Three things went in it:

1. I requested a gap exception (some plans call it a network exception). If there's no in-network provider who can actually deliver the covered service, they cover out-of-network at the in-network rate.

2. I cited the tri-agency FAQ, Part 54, which says in plain language that if a plan has no in-network provider who can provide lactation counseling, it must cover an out-of-network one with no cost sharing. Not at a discount. No cost sharing.

3. The Google Doc. All four names, dates, times, and the sentence "a lab" appearing in a document I sent to my insurance company.

Filed April 6. Paid May 22. $600, all of it, no cost share.

Nothing about this was clever. I was not smart, I was just annoying for fourteen weeks in a row while being sleep deprived and pumping in a supply closet. The denial is the opening offer. That's the whole trick. They deny because most people stop, and I have to assume it works, because I nearly stopped twice.

Found Brooke's post from the winter and it's exactly what's happening to me. 5pm to 10pm, continuous. Knowing it has a name and other people survived it is doing a lot of work right now.

We're half a year in. 300-odd of you, a directory that's four times the size it was, and a handful of providers who've told me they got clients from here. That last one is the only metric I actually care about. What should the next six months look like?

Three weeks in daycare, three illnesses, and now I have it too! Is this just the tax? Does it end or is this the rest of the year?

Flying next month with frozen milk and I've read the rules and I still don't trust that the person at the front will have. Has anyone actually been through with a cooler bag? What happened?

Lots of you are flying or road-tripping in the next two months. Would a proper checklist help? The actual logistics, car seats on planes, the milk-through-security rules that nobody at the airport seems to know either. Tell me what you'd want on it.

She's fighting the third nap but falls apart by 5pm without it. Do I hold the line or drop it and accept the witching hour? What did the transition actually look like for you?

Not the old self. A different one. I read the word 'matrescence' somewhere and cried at the kitchen table because someone had named it. Anyone else find that the identity part hit harder than the physical part?

Second baby, he's five weeks, and I have a 2yo who is currently eating dry cereal off the floor while I type this, so forgive the typos!

Around week two my nipples were creased flat coming out, like a lipstick, that shape everyone describes, and the pain was making me dread the letdown. With my first I never had this. I assumed second baby, easier, I know what I'm doing. I did not!

So I booked with a "lactation consultant" who does appointments out of a boutique baby store here in Sacramento. Her website said lactation consultant. Her sign said lactation consultant. She said lactation consultant on the phone. $225, cash, no superbill, and I paid it happily because I was in pain and I wanted help.

She watched maybe four minutes of a feed. Did not weigh him before or after. Did not put a gloved finger in his mouth. She looked under his tongue for a couple of seconds with her phone flashlight and said "posterior tongue tie, that's your problem," and handed me a card for a pediatric dentist who does laser releases. $700, cash, and he had an opening that Thursday.

I almost booked it. I was one tap from booking it. My husband, who is not a nervous person and does not usually push back on medical stuff, said something like, is she a doctor? And I said no, she's a lactation consultant, and he said okay, but what IS that. And I couldn't answer! i had paid this woman $225 and I could not tell you what her training was.

Here's what I found out. "Lactation consultant" is not a protected title in the US. Anyone can print it on a sign. The credential is IBCLC. Board certified, hundreds of supervised clinical hours, an exam, recertification. What she actually had was a weekend "lactation educator" certificate. Which is not nothing! It's a real thing that helps real people! It is also not the person who should be pointing at my son's mouth and sending me to a laser.

I found an actual IBCLC through the ILCA directory. $250. MORE than I paid the first woman! And it was ninety minutes. She weighed him before the feed and after (he transferred 2.7 oz in 18 minutes, which she said was great). She watched me latch him three different ways. And then she pointed out that I was doing the whole feed hunched sideways on the couch with one arm out, because my 2yo was climbing me, and my son was getting a shallow latch because I was physically not able to bring him to me.

She said, and I'm quoting: "I do see some restriction under his tongue. I'm not the person who diagnoses that. If we fix positioning and you still hurt in ten days, I'll send you for a functional assessment. A lot of what I see under tongues never needs releasing."

Six days of side-lying and a rolled towel and the pain is gone. Gone! My son still has whatever is under his tongue. He doesn't need a laser, he needed his mother to not be feeding him at a 45 degree angle while refereeing a toddler.

I'm not writing this to trash the first woman. I'm writing it because I have a graduate degree and I could not tell those two job titles apart, and I was four minutes and $700 from a surgical procedure on a five-week-old. How is anyone supposed to know this?

Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and eastern Oregon just got a lot less empty. New doulas, two IBCLCs and a pelvic floor PT who covers an absurd radius. If you're out there, have a look! And if you know someone still missing, you know where to find me.

A thread I want to keep and point people at, because I get this question in my inbox more than any other and I'm tired of answering it one email at a time!

Everyone tells you to "find a doula." Nobody tells you how. You search, you get a directory of names with no prices, you email four of them, one replies, she's booked until August, and you give up and tell yourself you'll manage.

So: if you hired someone. A birth doula, a postpartum doula, an IBCLC, a pelvic floor PT, overnight help, anyone. I want the boring parts.

How did you find her? Not "word of mouth." Whose mouth! Your OB? A local Facebook group? A friend? A directory, and if so which one?

What did it cost, actually? A number. I know this is the uncomfortable one and you can be vague about your city if you want, but the silence around price is doing real harm. People assume they can't afford something they've never been quoted.

Did insurance touch any of it? Even partially. Even after a fight. Especially after a fight, honestly, tell me how you won it!

How far did you travel? I'm collecting this one on purpose and I'll explain why another time.

And one more, because I think it's what actually breaks people. Did you know what you were hiring? A birth doula and a postpartum doula are not the same job. A night doula is a different job again. A newborn care specialist is a different job again. An IBCLC is a credential. A "lactation educator" is not the same thing and the words look identical when you're 3 days pp and crying.

I've watched people hire the wrong one and conclude the whole category was useless. That's not a them problem, that's a nobody-explained-it problem.

I'll keep this thread linked from the directory. Be as specific as you're comfortable being! The specifics are the entire value here.

Two weeks early, four hour labor, absolutely no time for the playlist. Thank you to everyone who answered my hundred questions since January! The day three warning was the single most useful thing anyone told me, and it was exactly as advertised.

First time round I napped. This time there's a two year old who does not respect the concept. Second-time moms, how did you survive the first trimester with an existing child?

Working on the insurance thing I mentioned. If you've had any maternal care covered (doula, lactation, pelvic floor, mental health) tell me what, which insurer, and whether it was a fight. Even 'they said no' is useful. I'm trying to build a picture nobody's published.

Baby is one, I'm cleared, I have no core to speak of and haven't run since 2024. Do I just... go? Or is there a sensible on-ramp that isn't 'couch to 5k' for someone who used to run 10ks?

One is crawling. One is not. The one who crawls has found the bottom stair. The one who doesn't watches like she's taking notes for later. I have approximately three weeks to childproof everything. What did I forget?

It's 9:30pm, both of them are finally down, and I'm sitting on the floor of the hallway outside their room eating cereal out of the box like a raccoon, so this is where we're at!

Boy/girl twins, Kofi and Ama, born October 2 at 35+4. So they're 31 weeks actual, about 26 adjusted, and I say that up front because I know somebody's going to ask and they'd be right to.

Where we were: both in one room, two cribs, room is 70F, 1.0 TOG sleep sacks, both rolled at 5 months so no swaddle, nothing in the cribs, white noise, blackout so dark I have walked into the dresser twice. Formula since about 5 months, solids started at 6, purees and some BLW. Ama takes a pacifier. Kofi rejects it with a level of contempt I find genuinely impressive. Wake windows are 2.5-3 hours, three naps, one of which is a 30 minute cat nap in the car because that's just my life now!

And they were waking every 90 minutes to two hours. Both. Not in sync, obviously, because that would be a gift! Ama at 11:20, Kofi at 12:40, Ama at 2:15, and so on until the sun comes up and I go to work. I have been doing this since roughly Christmas. I have fallen asleep at a red light. That's the sentence I'd like anyone who wants to tell me what I'm doing wrong to sit with first.

So Friday we started Ferber. Actual Ferber, the checks, 3 then 5 then 10.

Night 1: 47 minutes. Both of them. Kofi's cry has a sound in it I have not heard before and I would like to never hear again.

Night 2: 22 minutes, then Ama slept until 5:10 and I woke up at 3am in a panic and went in to check she was breathing, which I feel is worth including.

Night 3: 6 minutes. Six! I thought we'd done it. Then Kofi woke Ama at 1am and we were back to square one until 3.

Night 4 was tonight and I don't want to talk about night 4.

Anyway. What I actually need to say is this. Everyone told me the guilt would go away when it worked, and it's sort of working, and it hasn't gone away, it's gotten worse. Because now I have proof that it works, and that means all the nights I didn't do it were nights I chose not to. And on the other side of that, every time Kofi stops crying I feel this little flash of relief and then I think: did he stop because he's okay, or did he stop because he worked out nobody's coming.

I know the studies say no measurable harm. I've read them. I've read them at 4am, and 4am is not when you should read a study. It doesn't touch the thing.

I'm not asking if I should stop. I don't think I can stop. I'm asking whether anyone else did this and felt like this, and what you did with it, because right now I'm eating cereal on a floor and I feel like something that used to be a person.

I asked what you actually wanted. Almost nobody said a gift! The top answers were: a full night, someone else to book the appointments, and to not be asked what's for dinner. I've turned it into something you can forward to a well-meaning partner without having to say it out loud yourself.

Bought a hands-free set, put a windshield shade up, and now I pump on the drive home. It's the most efficient 25 minutes of my day. Slightly bleak? Yes. Working? Also yes. What's your unglamorous solution that actually works?

Bag packed, car seat in, brain absolutely nowhere. Someone tell me what the first 48 hours are actually like so I can stop imagining it.

Spending May on two things: filling the map in the Mountain West, and making it easier to find someone who takes your insurance. The insurance question comes up constantly and right now our answer is 'call and ask'. That isn't good enough. Anything you'd put ahead of those?

If I do it I'm cruel and if I don't I'm a martyr. I haven't even decided anything yet and I'm already braced for opinions. How did you decide what was right for your family without the noise?

Shower drain looks like a crime scene! I know it's a thing. I did not know it was this much of a thing. When does it stop??

A few people have told me they contacted someone from our directory and got no reply. That's on us as much as anyone. If you're listed and you're full, tell me and I'll mark it. I'd rather show fewer people who answer than more who don't.

Baby boy arrived Friday. Toddler took one look, said 'no thank you', and asked to watch Bluey. So that's going well! Second-time moms: how long before she stops pretending he doesn't exist?

Six months next week and everyone's telling me something different. Purees, baby led, both, neither. I'm mostly scared of the choking part. What did you actually start with on day one?

Every year the internet decides Mother's Day is about brunch. If there's one thing you'd actually want, from your partner, your mom, your friend, what is it? I'm putting together something honest instead of another gift guide for candles. Be specific!