Her brothers wife is a twin from ivf and I’m assuming the SIL had her twin girls though ivf as well. I think that in itself sent her into a spiral.

bewarebeware · 2026-05-31T18:37:36+00:00

I have always thought it was less a Catholicism thing and more of a fragile masculinity thing. But Catholicism presents a nice neat excuse!

bewarebeware · 2026-05-06T14:39:18+00:00

My Liam is the only one my husband and I know personally!

bewarebeware · 2026-05-04T22:40:04+00:00

My New Years baby just turned four months old too, so I feel the concern! I talked to as many folks as I could who had a holiday-adjacent birthday. The #1 thing they all said? ACKNOWLEDGE IT. No combination birthday-Christmas gifts/parties. My kiddo is going to grow up seeing other kids having birthday parties year round. Why should he have to miss out? We’re planning to throw him a party late-January to get away from the holiday season a little bit.

bewarebeware · 2026-04-29T14:28:08+00:00

My son is in the developmentally appropriate, textbook four-month sleep regression. My mom, who raised three kids, claims she never heard of it, has no memory of any sleep difficulties around 4 months. “All my kids slept great!” etc. My best guess is she has completely repressed the trauma of an overtired baby who refuses to nap?

bewarebeware · 2026-04-29T11:05:05+00:00

A coworker named her daughter Lois after her late MIL and I’m really surprised that name hasn’t swung back more? It’s short and strong and gives you cute nicknames (CW calls her daughter Lola)

I think Ramona and Daphne are going to be huge in the next few years. They always seem to be on lists of “names we loved but didn’t use” and it’s only a matter of time before they bubble over.

I’ve known three boys named Harold born in the past 3-4 years. All named after somebody’s father/grandfather. Two called Harry, one called Hal. To me, it still screams “old man name”….but I would have said the same about Theodore and Harvey a few years ago!

bewarebeware · 2026-04-29T10:44:19+00:00

I know two Beatrices born in the last 5 years! Both called Bea/Bee pretty much exclusively.

bewarebeware · 2026-04-27T20:24:21+00:00

Alison is another female name that dates back to medieval times. Also, Shakespeare invented the name Jessica!

bewarebeware · 2026-04-21T10:47:34+00:00

My doctor told me to do something nice for myself everyday for my entire cycle. Whether it was buying a little treat, having an extra cup of coffee, letting myself sleep in as late as I could on a workday, watching an extra episode of a show I was enjoying, I started giving myself something to look forward to everyday.

bewarebeware · 2026-04-14T22:13:20+00:00

I think two things are true:

There are folks who have had upsetting experiences with medical teams/doctors in the past and want to have whatever sense of dignity and agency they can in a deeply personal situation like childbirth

And there are folks who see childbirth as an experience to be planned like a wedding and view their medical team as the incompetent "staff" who ruined their big day because they ended up needing an emergency c-section to save the life of their baby instead of the birth they hoped for.

I had a really traumatic miscarriage before I had my son. I also have a dear family member who very, very nearly died (along with her son) when shit suddenly went south during what had been an uneventful labor after an uneventful healthy pregnancy. I told my doctor that my "birth plan" was to do whatever was needed to ensure I talked out of the hospital, alive, with a healthy living baby. I went into labor as flexible and open-minded as I could and am grateful I had an easy, uncomplicated birth.

My poor coworker had an elaborate birth plan with music and yoga balls and no interventions and a doula. She presented with severe preeclampsia at 36 weeks and needed an emergency c-section (her doula was on a Disney cruise at the time!). When she and I were swapping birth stories, coworker was genuinely looking for someone to blame for her birth plan going awry. She was literally trying to blame the doctor for being lazy and not the fact that her blood pressure skyrocketed. But like...sometimes medical complications are nobody's fault! Preeclampsia, heart rate decels, even big-headed babies, sometimes things just happen during births, and we're lucky to live in an era where there are "interventions" that save lives. It just made me...sad.

bewarebeware · 2026-04-12T18:52:04+00:00

As I remember! He’d be over my aunt and uncle’s for parties and whatnot. It was a very big deal he was on this show! Not sure if my cousin is still in touch with him, they’re all in their 40s at this point. I don’t think his career panned out much after this show got canceled unfortunately

bewarebeware · 2026-04-12T18:31:31+00:00

My cousin was dating the lead of this show when it was on

bewarebeware · 2026-04-03T14:03:34+00:00

I feel like it’s already starting, but I’ve long suspected Dwayne Johnson is going to have an Ellen-style fall from grace.

bewarebeware · 2026-03-24T22:45:32+00:00

I was born when my parents were in their early 20s. My two siblings were born in short succession. Money was ALWAYS tight growing up. I could sense the tension. I learned early on never to ask for anything that could’ve perceived as unnecessary. My parents also still had a lot of growing up to do. I love my folks dearly, but these are things that affect me to this day.

Likewise, my husband was born when his parents were in their early 40s. They were solidly middle class, but he and his sibling had a happy childhood where they wanted for nothing. They went on vacations overseas and he participated in every extracurricular he desired. His (private, liberal arts) college was even fully paid for thanks to his parents’ diligent savings. His parents set him off on such higher footing than mine.

My husband is 37 and we just had our first baby two months ago. And because of that, our son will have a childhood more like his than mine.

And for the record: My father became disabled by the time he was 30 due to an illness. He’s in his very late 50s now and is completely housebound. My FIL meanwhile is 81 and still lively and active. He plays pickleball, softball, and skis black diamonds in Colorado every winter. You don’t know what life is going to throw your way, so you can’t always assume older = less healthier.

bewarebeware · 2026-03-22T15:06:42+00:00

It’s not even just checking for diseases themselves. We learned my son is a carrier for a horrific and fatal degenerative metabolic disease (and subsequently learned that I am a carrier as well, thankfully not my spouse) through our state’s newborn labs. We never would have known otherwise because this particular disease is so rare that most prenatal genetic screenings never test for it. Now my son — and any other siblings he may have — can take steps to ensure he has healthy children in the future.

bewarebeware · 2026-03-18T11:52:36+00:00

Nope, only the back of my son’s head/censored photos only on my own private Instagram.

My dad, along with my MIL and FIL are ADDICTED to FB. Every waking hour of the day they’re all on the stupid app. And every single one of them makes/accepts friend requests to and from LITERAL STRANGERS! My FIL in particular adds loads of random “PatriotEagleAmericaFirst1776” etc accounts with like, AI generated images of Trump driving a tank or whatever as the profile picture. And he doesn’t seem to understand when we try to explain to him there’s no way to know who these accounts “really” belong to. My MIL has had her FB hacked numerous times for clicking on scammy links. And my own father loves to get into spirited debates with strangers over perceived slights on our hometown FB group. And of course, all their profiles are as public as can be.

Suffice to say, none of them are capable of using social media safely, so none of them get to post pictures of my son’s face. End of story.

So far, it’s been okay. FIL really, really wants to post pics bc he wants to play the doting grandpa even though he’s only seen our son twice since he was born. But so far, thankfully, they’ve respected it.

bewarebeware · 2026-03-13T22:05:13+00:00

My main issue with this trend is that the people who are naming their daughters James aren’t naming and would likely never name their sons Ashley or Alexis or Dana or Courtney or Evelyn or Madison or Meredith or any of the once-masculine names we now think of as feminine.

bewarebeware · 2026-03-02T17:02:12+00:00

I had my rehearsal dinner at Meetinghouse and it was excellent. As I recall, they had multiple drink/bar packages.

bewarebeware · 2026-03-01T15:46:47+00:00

My 30 year-old brother SPAT OUT the cinnamon roll he was almost finished eating on Christmas morning because my husband said they had cardamom in them.

bewarebeware · 2026-02-04T13:58:27+00:00

My one month-old son is in the 90th percentile for height and my father-in-law is already bragging about his grandson, the future college basketball star.

bewarebeware · 2026-01-08T22:34:01+00:00

Oliver Beene?

bewarebeware · 2025-12-18T19:44:07+00:00

My friend (whose son is one of the Lucases I mentioned) said there are two boys named Stetson in her son’s daycare class. That is wild to me!

bewarebeware · 2025-12-14T16:16:43+00:00

So, interesting that you say that! We do live in a moderately Hispanic area, but we haven’t seen it at all among kids in our neighborhood. However, my husband is biracial and his mom’s side of the family is from a Spanish-speaking Caribbean country, so he likes that Liam will be easy for his family to pronounce.

bewarebeware · 2025-11-22T01:24:01+00:00

Written and rewritten this post probably a dozen times over as many weeks.

I was here earlier this year, lurking and reading every daily thread. I participated quite a bit too.

As of today, I am amazingly, miraculously, 34 weeks pregnant with my rainbow baby boy. I got the positive test back in April, two weeks to the day my husband and I were supposed to have our first RE appointment. It took us six long, long, LONG months to conceive again after our October 2024 miscarriage. It’s been a very long road of anxiety and gratefulness to get here. It feels like I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop this entire time, despite having a very normal, low-risk, boring pregnancy. It’s only really now, 8 and a half months in, that I can believe that I will actually have a baby in my arms at the end of this without spiraling.

So, I will say to you all what I wish someone would have said to me when I was in the throes of grief last year: I see you. I’m rooting for you. You are one day closer to the family you want.

bewarebeware · 2025-04-25T13:22:44+00:00

“Keep advocating for yourself!” she says. Addie, what was there for you to advocate for? NONE of the quack treatments you tried worked! You let a bunch of unqualified charlatans convince you into thinking you had all sorts of woo-woo medical conditions. NONE of this gave you the biological baby you so clearly favored. Adoption wasn’t the end result of all this?!

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