u/luvs2meow

Today I purchased a red tagged art piece for my baby’s nursery. I assumed it was red tagged because there was a little dirt on the canvas I knew I’d be able to wipe off. However, when I got home I took off the cardboard corners and set the piece aside, only to later step on something sharp on my baby’s rug. That something looked like wood on one side but was like… rocky? plaster? I don’t know. It kind of seemed like a type of fiberglass because it sort of crumbled in my fingers and felt sharp. I checked the frame from the art and i realized it was part of the corner of the frame and i didnt realize it had come off when I was pulling off the cardboard packaging. I don’t really want it now because first of all i thought the frame was wooden but its some unidentifiable material, and second it isn’t easy to repair since the material is not actually wood and I couldn’t find all of the missing piece. Am I able to return this??

I have always been very close with my grandparents and for most of my life saw them on a weekly basis. My grandpa passed a few years ago and my grandma is now in a memory care unit for dementia/Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t forget people, just where she is and what she did that day. We often think she tries to use her diagnosis to manipulate us but we can never be quite sure.

Well, I recently had a baby and my grandma is obsessed. She met my baby when she was 3 weeks old and has seen her nearly every other weekend since. We have other family and of course want family time of our own, so I feel every other weekend is plenty for a great-grandma. Despite this, she calls me crying everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, asking why I don’t let her see my baby, saying she misses my baby so bad it’s going to kill her, and nothing will make her happy except seeing my baby. I‘m usually quite patient with her but one day I refused to entertain it and simply said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, you should look at the photos I send to your digital frame until you can see her again.” She then called me 2 hours later and said, “Someone just told me you had a baby, i didn’t know you were having a baby, I’m so confused.” I personally think she was lying because I wasn’t receptive to her calls about missing my baby, seeing as she never forgot I was pregnant/had a baby before then. Every voicemail up until that point she was stating my baby’s name.

I’m getting frustrated. I’ve explained to her that everyone works so they can’t just pick her up in the middle of the week to visit. I know she probably thinks I should bring baby to her since I’m on maternity leave, and I will try to start visiting her in the nursing home with baby soon but was waiting for baby to get bigger, and we have contractors here most days completing a bathroom reno so I can’t just leave. Either way, I do not have the emotional bandwidth or energy to appease my grandma. The constant calls and emotional manipulation are making me resent her, which then makes me feel guilty. Is there anything I can do to put a stop to this behavior? I’ve tried ignoring her but I feel like that makes it worse. Thank you for any insight or help.

I had a c-section 2 months ago. I went in to be induced at 41 weeks and they realized baby was breech so I had a scheduled c section 8 hours later. I had a healthy pregnancy and they thought baby was head down from 36 weeks on so it was quite a shock for me.

This is my first child and I have been very emotional about it. Initially i was sad I didn’t get to experience contractions or vaginal birth (I know people probably think that’s crazy). Now I have so much anxiety about future pregnancies/births. I want at least 2 more kids but I am so worried about the risks now that I had a c section. I had no idea there were so many potential complications.

I’ve been trying to stay positive. I’m so grateful for my baby and that I’ve had a good recovery, but sometimes when I’m alone I just cry and cry about it. I feel like a big baby to be honest. I know plenty of people who had c sections and they never seemed emotional about it. Is this normal? How do I get over this??

My mom is a super consumer, like multiple Amazon packages everyday type of person. She’s addicted to shopping and it’s driven me crazy for many years.

Since I got pregnant it’s a constant barrage of texts with photos or links of things she wants to buy baby. A lot of them are outrageous weird Amazon shit too, like this giant elephant bed, or things that aren’t even safe for babies. I get frustrated because I try to be intentional about the items I bring into my home and I feel like I just have to accept junk that I don’t really want if that makes sense (though I’m very grateful that she wants to support us and baby, I feel like it has to be on her terms). We’ve gotten into arguments about it. Every time she gets an ad for some crazy baby thing she wants to buy it.

Well, my baby just turned two months old and she sent a gift from Amazon to our house. I asked if she could cancel it because we already have similar toys (and she doesn’t need a gift every month of her life, and shes a baby, she doesn’t know what gifts are). She said I was being rude and it’s ridiculous that she can’t buy her grandbaby a gift. I said Id just appreciate it if she ran them by me first or asked if there was anything we needed or wanted for baby. It turned into a big fight.

Am I being unreasonable? Has anyone else successfully managed this? I can imagine its only going to get significantly worse as my baby gets older. I feel like I’m expected to be grateful and so excited but I’m not.

We have a wooden privacy fence around our backyard. While my dog (8 year old frenchie) has no issue with the dogs on either side of our house, he will bark incessantly and lunge at the fence when the dogs behind our house are out. They have 4 dogs who bark at my dog and try to dig under the fence, which triggers my already reactive dog. I’ve seen them stick their faces in the holes they dig and my dog tries to bite their faces, all of them barking frantically. There is about 10 feet of honeysuckle in front of that part of the fence so it’s really challenging to extract him when he’s going nuts. (We removed a third of the honeysuckle last year, but it is a huge project so will be another few years before we have it all removed.) He won’t respond to the come command when they’re out so we have to chase him through the honeysuckle and catch him.

The people behind us are not nice. They cuss each other out and have fights and barrel fires even though we’re in a suburb, so I’m kind of scared of them. I installed anti-dig stakes along the fence where their dogs dig and the lady said to me through the fence, “It don’t matter what you do, that’s just what dogs do.” I said, “Yeah but they’re trying to bite each other, so I’d rather they not.” They've also mocked me when I have called for my dog, and will loudly discuss among themselves how annoying my dog is. And I agree it’s annoying but I don’t know what else to do (and arguably their dogs are more annoying since they’re the ones digging and I’m the only one who has tried to prevent it). I worry about my dog’s safety, he’s already had a few unexplainable injuries that I believe were due to lunging at the fence (he broke 3 of his front teeth, has had eye injuries). Part of the reason we bought the house was so he’d have a fenced yard to play in so it’s frustrating that it’s become such a hassle.

I recently bought a lead for the yard to hook him up to when he’s outside but I hate to use it. Does anyone have suggestions for what else I can do here??

My (32f) husband (32m) and I have been married two years, but together over a decade.

Some context: I recently gave birth to our baby. Right after I got pregnant he got promoted at work and his work habits changed a lot. Whereas he used to leave work everyday at 5, he wasn’t leaving until 6 or 630. He used to go to happy hour once a month, then it became almost once a week (and until 10-11 at night). He also would keep working on his laptop after he did get home and he is constantly texting his coworkers, and just generally on his phone more. When I would tell him it upset me because our lives were about to change drastically and he wasn’t spending any time with me he’d say he was doing it to network and provide for our family (we both have good jobs though so I’ve never expected him to ”provide”). I’ve never had reason to think he’d cheat but obviously being pregnant (and us having sex less, my body changing, etc) it crossed my mind. I found it upsetting that he’d spend all day at work with these people then go to happy hour or text them all night. I felt neglected and told him so, but it didn’t change his behavior until baby was born. There were lots of instances that really hurt me, like getting home late on my birthday, not telling me about happy hour until he was already there, etc. and it felt like I was the bad guy for being upset.

What really concerned me is a female coworker who I’ve never met but he brings up from time to time. I was never worried until he said she cried to him that she had a bad performance review - when I had a bad performance review I cried to my two closest female colleagues, so I found it a bit odd she’d cry to him unless they were really close. When I later commented that he knows a lot about this woman's life he said it’s because they have an open office floor plan so you just overhear conversations.

I'm now home with baby and he’s admittedly been much better about trying to get home at a decent time. He is a good dad to baby and has been very supportive to me post partum, taking care of me and everything else while I was recovering.

But today he forgot his phone at home and I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to see if he texted with the female coworker I mentioned above, and he does. They mostly text in a chat with another male coworker, but he does have a text thread with just her. They have inside jokes it seems, and she texted him while he was home on paternity leave that they were being forced to move desks so they might not be able to sit near each other anymore, to which he responded in mutual disappointment. It also seemed like some texts were deleted, but I couldn’t be certain. Most texts were them “spilling the tea” about office gossip, the only personal things they discussed actually were me being pregnant/having the baby. He once texted her that he was grabbing a coffee and asked if she wanted one, and he said, “don’t worry, I don’t expect anything in return.” And by chance, after I saw all this, I had to go out with baby and my car broke down so I had to contact him at work. He apparently couldn’t call me back using the work phone so he used her phone. He didn’t tell me it was her phone, I knew because Verizon now has caller ID. When I said something about it he said everyone else had already left for the holiday weekend.

I’m not happy about all of this. Even if he’s not physically cheating I feel like it’s… weird. Too close for comfort. I feel like he mislead me about their closeness, especially with the whole desk thing and claiming you just hear conversations. I admittedly feel jealous that he’s offering to buy her coffee but he couldn’t be bothered to come home at a decent hour on my birthday. I want to confront him but I feel guilty I went through his phone and I don’t want him to be mad at me. But I also know if I was that close with a male colleague he’d be disgruntled.

Am I in the wrong? Should I confront him about the texts and his relationship with this woman, or am I overreacting?

tl;dr I went through my husband’s phone and saw that he has been texting a female colleague who he’s downplayed his relationship with and now I don’t know how to confront him about it.

FTM, baby is 4 weeks today and I‘m planning to exclusively breastfeed until July, when I’ll start pumping and bottle feeding in preparation for returning to work in August.

My question is, how do you actually leave the house without baby if you’re EBF? Can you? Should I just start pumping now? I left today for a dentist appointment but it only took 30 minutes. We were on a pretty decent 3 hour schedule but it’s not perfect and some days we are an hour off or she is still cluster feeding, so I don’t want to go far or be gone too long. I’d really like to be able to just run errands or schedule a hair appointment but it all seems like a logistical nightmare unless I take baby with, or time it perfectly. Do I just have too much anxiety about all this?

Thanks for any help!!