Seriously. There is no good intuitive reason for there to be a dime-sized amount of blood coming out of a newborn’s vagina. This is exactly the kind of thing that someone just straight up needs to tell a person, because the only rational response to seeing that, unless you are a pediatrician or pediatric…

I think it doesn’t happen with 100% of baby girls, or if it does, it’s so mild in many that it escapes notice. For me, it was a few smears of blood in the diaper on day 2, and then kind of an egregious amount of leaking fluid from her tiny nipples on and off for the first month. I know some parents who experienced…

So real. SO real.

You’re so welcome, and congratulations! I learned this because I was actually doing some research that intersected with pediatric endocrinology, and I when I learned, before I had kids, I was like, A) I’m tucking this piece of information away, and B) YOU SHOULD NOT NEED TO BE DOING ENDOCRINE RESEARCH TO LEARN THIS…

Some more than others I think. My second is a boy, and I have friends who had a boy about 6 months after I did, and as I was visiting, one of them asked, “how do you not have pee on everything? How do you change a diaper without getting a firehose of pee on you and everything around you every single time?” and I was…

Congratulations! How are you feeling?

Three most important pieces of advice I wish someone had told me before I had my first baby:

This was exactly my first thought.  

Heartbreaking. I have so many feelings about this, about how crippling addiction is, how hard having young children is, how judgment and education and awareness of biology and knowledge of counterintuitive risks are not baseline qualities, how terrifyingly fragile babies are, how easy it is even for non-addicted,…

This needs more stars.  A very soulful take.

To me, the point of this whooooooole thing is:

me

I hate this in theory, for all the reasons, but goddamn it just made me cry so bad. So bad.

I love what you wrote. It’s such a great example of stepping up for yourself, having your own back the way you’d have the back of a close friend, supporting and celebrating yourself the way you would support and celebrate someone else you love.

Ok, I have honest advice, being a person who has really struggled with a fear of rejection, mild agoraphobia, social awkwardness, and generalized anxiety, not to mention periods of time when I just couldn’t get a handle on my self-esteem and knew that low confidence oozed off of me.

Open. Close up on Compound. RevCam eats sandwich as Annie Clownfaces nearby.

HAHAHA what is this gif???

it’s more of a macrostatement than a tailored-for-all-relevant-situations statement, but I can parse it out further if necessary:

FOR THE LOVE OF THE SWEET BABY JESUS WHO DIED ON THE CROSS.

Jesusfuckingchrist, right?!