I've gone back-and-forth on posting this reply and I'm sorry if it puts negative thoughts in your mind. I really don't mean to bring up negativity in response to what is ostensibly a positive post.

Posts like this are fascinating to me. We only managed to make it to about the end of the first trimester on our longest run and that one almost killed her. We decided to go the fostering route after that, so I don't really have any experiences from later on in the process. One thing that we did "get to" experience is the wave of "experts" that apparently just materialize out of the walls. Everyone has their own tomes of advice to offer and it's almost always complete bunk. I think that's probably the most annoying element of it all.

Once you get into parenting, things get on rails. There's a kind of anxiety you can get into where you overthink every single decision. You can't let things get there. You have instincts and they've worked for the entirety of human history before now. There's nothing that says they shouldn't keep working.