Recovery Notes

Why your lower back hurts after birth (and what actually helps)
Lower back pain after birth catches most people off guard. You expect the healing everyone talks about — the incision, the bleeding, the soreness. The back pain shows up quietly, usually a few weeks in, and it doesn't get the same airtime.Where it actually comes fromA few things stack on top of each other. Your core muscles, which normally help support your spine, spent nine months stretching and now need time to reconnect. Your posture shifts constantly, hunched over a feed, bent over a crib, carrying a car seat on... Read more...
How to size a postpartum belly band correctly
Postpartum belly bands are usually sized like everything else in maternity — by pre-pregnancy dress size. The problem is your postpartum body doesn't match your pre-pregnancy size, and it keeps changing for weeks after birth. Sizing off an old number is how you end up with a band that doesn't fit by week three.Measure where the band actually sitsSkip the dress size guesswork. Wrap a soft tape measure around your body at the belly button — that's where a postpartum band naturally sits, and it's the measurement that actually matters.Between... Read more...
The fourth trimester, explained
Everyone talks about the first, second, and third trimesters. Almost nobody talks about the fourth — the roughly twelve weeks after birth, when your body is doing as much work healing as it did growing a person in the first place.It's not a metaphor. Your uterus is shrinking back down. Your core and pelvic floor are rebuilding. If you had a C-section, that incision is healing under everything else you're doing. Hormones are resetting on their own timeline, mostly while you're running on fragmented sleep and holding a newborn most... Read more...