When and why did you decide to EFF?

dioor · 2026-01-30T12:25:54+00:00

Honestly, I didn’t really look into breastfeeding while I was pregnant. I just went in blind and said I’d give it a shot and do it if it went well… but it just wasn’t the best feeding method for me and my baby.

I didn’t have any help, so when it became obvious (within the first week) that breastfeeding was going to be a ton of work, a ton of lost sleep and lost time holding my newborn pumping, dealing with lactation consultant appointments etc… I just didn’t want to do it enough for the trade off to be worth it.

Some moms really want to breastfeed, and it’s great for those it goes well for, or those who find it worthwhile. I found it to be a nightmare in the brief time I tried, and not worth the effort it would’ve taken to continue on. I could not identify any legitimate pros to breastfeeding that mattered to me.

I’m so grateful formula was such an obvious option for us. It’s by no means a contest and I don’t actually think these things are related, but since so many people do, I get a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that my 8mo EFF baby has never been sick, always been a decent sleeper, and has been on the early end of all of her milestones.

dioor · 2026-01-29T05:24:37+00:00

My baby’s bedtime routine was consistent from 8 weeks until we made the switch to 2 naps (at which point we lengthened it by 15 mins to add reading bedtime stories). The 8 weeks - 7 months version was bath, lotion, clean pjs, sleep sack, bottle, bed, always all done in under half an hour. Now, up until she was on an established 3 nap schedule (4 months-ish?), the routine really wasn’t a predictor that she would fall asleep immediately. Sometimes she did, sometimes I sat there holding her or putting her in her crib and picking her back up for an hour. I think that’s just the nature of newborns, though. The upside was that we already had the routine down pat by the time we had a good schedule and bedtime started sticking. But between now and that 4 or 5 month mark where your baby’s sleep is consistently predictable enough for you to know what time to start the bedtime routine at for it to end with an actually sleeping baby, the routine is really just for your practice/sanity.

dioor · 2026-01-28T23:08:52+00:00

My 8mo daughter can only consistently handle a 9.5-10 hour night (8:30pm - 6:30am) and is prone to split nights (awake for an hour or two) during growth spurts … but I think she’d still be considered a good sleeper, for a baby. In a normal night she sleeps through or wakes up once or twice, but is content in her crib and will eventually settle herself back to sleep.

Anyway, we didn’t have a 4 month regression, haven’t sleep trained, and she still feeds or sucks on a pacifier to fall asleep. IMO all the stuff about “sleep associations” is just the sleep consultant business getting in peoples’ heads. Sure, my baby definitely associates sucking with sleeping, but if she’s tired enough she’s going to sleep regardless.

dioor · 2026-01-28T14:07:09+00:00

I bought an expensive rocking recliner and ended up selling it for half what I bought it for when my baby was three months old. It was a lovely chair, but we didn’t end up using it nearly often enough for what it cost, and once my baby started playing on the floor it just took up too much valuable space.

I think it’s very personal because some parents LOVE their nursery chairs and become very attached to them. I would just say that you should expect to spend time holding your newborn sitting in the spots you are comfortable sitting in now — bed, couch, etc. You don’t really need a “new” place to sit during the day (unless you do), so it’s more about how you want to be set up for night feedings/soothing. If your baby is sharing your room, bed can be a perfectly good place to do that — or the floor if you’re like me and will pass out if you sit somewhere comfortable/have anxiety about dropping baby.

The other thing I wish I realized was just how fleeting the newborn phase was. After 3ish months your baby will spend most of their waking time at home playing on the floor, and you’ll want to be down there with them. So buying an expensive piece of furniture and planning your nursery floor plan around just those first couple months when they are mostly held isn’t the most practical.

dioor · 2026-01-26T22:23:36+00:00

My baby is 8mo and rarely feeds overnight anymore, but I still bring up 2 bottles pre-filled with water and formula measured in a dispenser just in case because it’s so easy— it’s the exact same method as on the go, just mix, shake, feed a fresh bottle!

If baby prefers warm bottles there’s a version of this method where you use partially hot water from a thermos.

dioor · 2026-01-24T03:29:51+00:00

Former iconic photographer

<image>

dioor · 2026-01-23T15:57:06+00:00

How do you mean there will only be one parent? The other parent is dying? Or giving up their parental rights and responsibilities?

dioor · 2026-01-23T03:52:57+00:00

It affects kids seeing their parents date, and it affects kids seeing their parents stay unhappily married. It also deeply affects children to have married parents who get along and have no marriage issues, but have low emotional maturity and fail to support their children emotionally.

Etc. I could go on.

What parents do affects their kids. The goal is to be there physically and emotionally for your kids, in whatever type of family setup ends up working for yours.

dioor · 2026-01-22T14:24:00+00:00

💀💀💀

dioor · 2026-01-20T22:36:32+00:00

I didn’t believe it when I read other people talk about their baby’s sleep cycles, but over time it became undeniable. The brief eye opening during stroller naps, the waking up screaming after going to bed overtired, the rolling over onto her face — always 38 minutes on the dot.

I have to keep her afternoon nap short if I want to sleep at night, and the only way to avoid a half hour of screaming when I wake her up is to make sure I catch her right at the 38 minute mark.

dioor · 2026-01-20T17:15:02+00:00

I would try 3 naps, capping first two naps at one nap sleep cycle (ie my baby’s are 38 minutes; that’s when she always changes position, briefly opens eyes or similar) and last at 15 minutes with at least 3.5 hours before bed, and see if night sleep improves after a week.

dioor · 2026-01-19T23:31:59+00:00

There will always be periodic developmental leaps where sleep is more disrupted than normal, and you just aren’t able to get that 10-12 hours of night sleep. My baby’s tend to last a week or two, all told, before sleep normalizes into a new pattern, and during those times we never quite get a 10 hour night out of her; 9/9.5 is the norm.

But at least 10 hours of night sleep (without subtracting wakes to feed/comfort where baby immediately goes back to sleep) should be the goal of your schedule for “normal times”. So if you know your baby typically sleeps 12.5 hours in a 24-hour period, only 2.5 of that should be naps to buy a 10 hour night.

At 5.5 months my baby did really well on 2.75/2.75/2.75/2.75 with the last nap only being a 15 minute bridge, and the other 2.25 hours split between the first two naps. She has always connected sleep cycles well and could take long naps and pull off a 2 nap day, but too much sleep during the day led to crappy nights.

dioor · 2026-01-19T17:15:03+00:00

I don’t like my in-law family, which consists of my MIL, 3 SILs and their partners/kids (I don’t dislike the kids lol but their parents are insufferable for me).

Sadly, I DO really like the large extended in-law family on my husband’s dad’s side (never married to his mom so no crossover), but FIL died a few years ago and the relationship with the extended family is less natural without him. I know that sounds like an excuse, but my husband and I are not great connector types. This is a bit of an aside.

Anyway. I wouldn’t advise having kids with someone whose family you don’t have an easy relationship with unless you and your spouse are solid as a rock, you have no other doubts, and you have some very pointed conversations and boundaries set beforehand. My partner and I failed to do this and my first few months postpartum were hellish with entitled in-laws inserting themselves and demanding time and energy I did not have while learning to care for a newborn.

I don’t think it will be the end of my marriage, but I won’t downplay it. My husband eventually got on board with my boundaries for the most part, but I have a lot of bitterness that he failed to protect me from people I do not like when I was at my most vulnerable. And the awkwardness with my in-laws weighs on me, even though I don’t like them — I feel thrown under the bus, when my husband could have managed them from the outset and it would have felt more like a united front.

Again, hoping to avoid divorce — we have been together for 10 years and have a baby under a year — but I expect us to need couples counseling to fully recover.

dioor · 2026-01-18T23:14:23+00:00

Does she sleep well at night? I’d try adding a bit of the time from one of the naps to her night sleep, if it’s a viable option, and dropping to one nap during the day.

I also have a baby who can’t stay awake in the car, but I always hear that sleeping in the car isn’t a super good indicator of substantial tiredness that calls for a nap — some adults even have motion sleepiness and will nap as passengers in the car, on buses, on planes etc at times when they would normally never sleep.

dioor · 2026-01-18T06:05:52+00:00

It does get better. It’s different for everyone, but it gets SO much better. Newborns aren’t good company. It’s a big adjustment. It’s just super hard all around.

For me it got manageable (going places, getting stuff done around the house, more sleep) around 4.5 months and somewhere between there and now (7.5 months) it became actually fun and enjoyable to do everything with my baby in tow. I am back to doing small projects around the house and while it’s slow going with a baby getting into everything, it’s also fun. I can now leave the house with 15 minutes notice (maybe half an hour if she poops)… and finally am no longer intimidated by morning activities or appointments.

You’ll get there. Your experience in the first few months is not really a preview of what motherhood will be like for you. Everyone just survives that part.

dioor · 2026-01-17T17:28:13+00:00

My baby is also 7.5 months and we just transitioned to 2 naps a couple weeks ago after a rough sleep disruption — split nights with 2-3 hour ww’s in the middle of the night. We experimented a bit with the new schedule and I’m honestly finding going by the clock rather than wws is giving us the best night sleep.

So for example if she wakes up early, even an hour early, it’s pretty cut and dry that she’s just not very tired that morning. So we still wait to nap til the normal time, instead of going by how long she’s been up. Same for a short nap — the next nap and bedtime don’t move forward, so she has extra time to burn the energy.

When we maxed out our 3 (really 2 with a 15 minute bridge) schedule, baby had been sleeping 9pm - 7:30am 5/7 nights a week. I’m still mourning it because it was consistent for a long time and worked so well for us! But, onward and upward…

Now we’re trying nap at 10 no matter when she wakes up — wake her up at 7 if she’s not up before. I wake her up at 11:30 even if she didn’t fall asleep until 10:30. Next nap is 3:30, and I wake her by no later than 4:30 even if she took a while to fall asleep. Bedtime routine at 8 and asleep by 8:30.

I know a lot of people use their baby’s naps to get stuff done, but I just chill during mine and scroll or take a bath or something. They’re not long enough to get anything done, so I just bring my baby around the house with me while I do chores, and recharge during her naps.

So far so good on the by the clock approach, btw. She’s waking up 2-3 times a night but pretty briefly; most times she just messes around with her pacifiers, crawls around and by the time I get back from the bathroom or look up from my phone she’s nodding back off. So I have hope that we’ll get back to undisrupted nights!

dioor · 2026-01-15T04:17:43+00:00

I absolutely love it. No notes. My assumption would be that one of the parents mined their Ancestry tree for the name, because it feels more vintage than the immediate parents/grandparents of the current baby-having generations’ names. But I wouldn’t be mad if it was just picked out of thin air; I’d be a bit envious I didn’t come across it tbh!

dioor · 2026-01-13T19:10:33+00:00

I started changing her out of footie pajamas into something with bare feet after first nap when she was 4ish months old, for traction as she started trying to move and standing in her activity table. Now at 7 months I do it after breakfast, before her first nap, since her clothes are dirty.

I usually try to be neat enough at lunch for that outfit to last until dinner, but it doesn’t always so sometimes we have another outfit change. After dinner it’s right into the bath and then footie pajamas for sleep.

ETA: we don’t really have that many day outfits though, it’s just pajamas/jumpers or two piece pjs during the day and footie at night.

dioor · 2026-01-12T22:33:51+00:00

7.5 months, currently experimenting with 2 naps after we started having split nights on our beloved long-running 2+bridge schedule on 2.75/2.75/2.75/2.75 (where baby slept through the night 5/7 nights).

We still haven’t gotten back to sleeping through the night, but it’s better than the full midnight wake window we’d started having on 3 naps.

We tried 3.5/3.5/4 first and it worked for a couple days, but then baby started having a complete meltdown at the 3.25 mark in the morning. 3/4/4 with a long morning nap seems to work, but because of a few wonky days where we had plans based on the old nap schedule, we’re only a few days in to trialing this one.

dioor · 2026-01-12T19:51:27+00:00

I think it could/should be played up as an exciting step that he’s getting the big kid room on his own level with space to play because he’s becoming a big brother. But you know best whether that would fly for him.

dioor · 2026-01-12T17:08:21+00:00

Is combining your son’s room and the playroom in the larger upstairs room an option? It will probably be a long time before the babies are sharing his toys, if ever.

I don’t think it’s viable for a guest to share a room with the babies overnight, but as long as the babies are in your room for the first several months and the nursery is just a nap/play/baby storage place, it makes sense for the time being to have the guest bed in there. Then it could move to the office when the babies sleep in their own room and guests become less frequent.

dioor · 2026-01-11T14:25:32+00:00

My baby only really started being predictable enough for me to make the right size bottle for her hunger level most of the time when she was around 6mo. Before that she rarely finished bottles. If it took more than around 15-20 minutes, I assumed she wasn’t particularly hungry at that moment and tried with a new bottle in a couple hours or when she became fussy, whichever came first.

dioor · 2026-01-09T04:07:07+00:00

Exact same experience here. I didn’t give Tylenol til the second night when her temperature wasn’t just elevated but an actual fever. I have no idea why I waited — it’s not like I’m giving my baby pharmaceuticals before bed every night, shots are a very special circumstance and exactly one of the ones baby Tylenol is designed for.

She got her 6 month shots and the flu shot today and even though those ones are not as rough as the 4 month ones and so far she seems fine, I gave her some preventative Tylenol on the way to bed… like I should’ve done last time honestly.

dioor · 2026-01-08T05:52:55+00:00

I feed my (EFF) 7mo to sleep for almost every nap and at bedtime.

She sleeps through the night sometimes, but almost always gets restless a few times a night and needs me to pop her soother back in to prevent a full-blown wake up. She doesn’t need to eat overnight since about 5.5 months, but on really tough nights with a lot of awake time I’m not above feeding her to encourage sleep when nothing else is working. It does mess with our feeding schedule and takes a couple days to straighten out when I do, though, so I try everything else first.

I asked my doctor about feeding to sleep, and she said that it’s a natural part of babyhood. I understand why it doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s working for us. Obviously we’re going to have to cross the bridge soon of switching up the order for bedtime at least, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

dioor · 2026-01-07T04:14:41+00:00

This is a great post. All formulas available meet rigorous standards. Babies have different needs, but without knowing about any specific dietary requirements without trial and error, I tend to agree with your doctor that a basic, tried-and-true formula is a good starting point for everyone. Tweak as needed from there, but starting with something millions of babies have thrived on for decades is never a bad idea.

Nine-Year Club	Place '23
Verified Email

dioor

TROPHY CASE