Two weeks postpartum, and Aria was starting to feel almost human again.
Not completely human, because she was still exhausted, still sore, and still navigating the strange new reality of being responsible for another person's life. But the fog of the first week had lifted slightly. The terror had dulled to manageable anxiety, and the constant feeling that she was doing everything wrong had shifted to cautious optimism that maybe, possibly, she was doing some things right.
Emma was fourteen days old, and She'd gained weight steadily, now weighing eight pounds, two ounces according to their home scale. She was nursing well, sleeping in three-hour stretches at night (a luxury after the first week when she'd woken every ninety minutes), and had started making little cooing sounds that melted
