• DON’T use a hot water bottle - lol.
• ONLY pads - NO tampons. Tampons can cause severe infection, not to mention, you probably don’t want to be shoving anything up there any time soon.
• If you’ve had stitches, sitz baths DO help relieve the pain. Another great pain reliever? Dampen some pads and freeze them. Let one thaw slightly and use it on top of another pad. This will help with the pain as well as reduce swelling. Change the pad out as soon as it’s thawed completely. This REALLY helps on the first couple days after giving birth.
• If you pass a clot, don’t sweat it. Even the one I passed, which was fucking massive, just required that we keep an eye out to make sure it didn’t happen again. If it does, talk to your doctor.
• Take a pain killer half an hour before nursing. Because YES - your uterus is contracting after you give birth, to get back to its original size, and nursing causes much stronger contractions. Taking nursing-safe painkillers won’t prevent the pain, but it will reduce it. 
• Buy disposable underwear for the first few days after birth. They will get VERY dirty. Or use your ratty old pairs that you’re ready to get rid of. Double up on pads - line them all the way up your ass-crack. I am so serious. And wear dark pants.
• Pee in the shower. You do NOT want to wipe down there right after birth because ow. Peeing in the shower lets you just rinse afterwards. Especially if you’ve had stitches, peeing in the shower, with the shower-head rinsing AS you go, keeps stinging to a minimum. And fuck everyone else - keep on peeing in the shower until you feel ready to move back to toilet paper. Middle of the night and need to pee? Get your pants off - get in the shower and just go.

Why (interstate) highways have become the center of civil rights protest

The racial history of highways — and the power of blocking them.

www.washingtonpost.com

After activists protesting the death of Philando Castile left the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, Minn., on Saturday night, they marched through the city down Lexington Parkway and then onto the highway, across all eight lanes of traffic. There, some of them sat down, a provocative gesture of civil disobedience in the face of rushing commerce.

They were occupying a highway that, a half-century ago, was constructed at the expense of St. Paul’s historically black community. Interstate 94, like urban highways throughout the country, was built by erasing what had been black homes, dispersing their residents, severing their neighborhoods and separating them from whites who would pass through at high speed.

That history lends highways a dual significance as activists in many cities rally against unequal treatment of blacks: As scenes of protest, they are part of the oppression — if also the most disruptive places to call attention to it.

“If you can find a way to jam up a highway — literally have the city have a heart attack, blocking an artery — it causes people to stand up and pay attention,” said Nathan Connolly, a historian at Johns Hopkins University. “Highways still perform their historic role from a half-century ago. They help people move very easily across these elaborately segregated landscapes.”

Block a highway, and you upend the economic life of a city, as well as the spatial logic that has long allowed people to pass through them without encountering their poverty or problems. Block a highway, and you command a lot more attention than a rally outside a church or city hall — from traffic helicopters, immobile commuters, alarmed officials.

“We’re the home of Dr. Martin Luther King,“ anxious Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said on Saturday, acknowledging the city’s legacy of protest but drawing a line at the interstate on-ramp. “The only thing I ask is that they not take the freeways. Dr. King would never take a freeway.”

That is not strictly accurate: King led the 1965 march that iconically occupied the full width of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. But as protests in Atlanta approached the high-speed artery that courses through the city’s downtown, Reed understood that the stakes were much higher, both for the safety of the protesters and the functioning of the region.

That, however, is precisely the point.

"When people disrupt highways and streets, yes, it is about disrupting business as usual,” said Charlene Carruthers, an activist in Chicago and the national director of Black Youth Project 100. “It’s also about giving a visual that folks are willing to put their bodies on the line to create the kind of world we want to live in.”

A news helicopter in Oakland last Thursday night captured one such remarkable image on Interstate 880: a line of red taillights in one direction, white headlights in the other, as a narrow line of bodies blocked all lanes of the highway in between.

Later over the weekend in San Francisco, protesters tied up on-ramps onto the Bay Bridge, the city’s lone direct connection to the East Bay. The protests in St. Paul blocked Interstate 94 for several hours, prompting riot charges against dozens of people. In Atlanta, protesters blocked the I-75/85 Downtown Connector.

[How railroads, highways and other man-made lines racially divide America’s cities]

The latest blockades, after a week in which graphic videos documented the police-involved deaths of Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, follow dozens of others over the past two years. Protesters in Chicago have blocked Lake Shore Drive. In New York, they’ve gnarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. In Washington, they’ve targeted the 14th Street Bridge.

Researchers at the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, in a forthcoming study, counted more than 1,400 protests in nearly 300 U.S. and international cities related to the Black Lives Matter movement from November 2014 through May 2015. Half or more of the protests in that time in Saint Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., wound up shutting down transportation infrastructure.

“We systematically show that the political protest today is now almost totally focused on transportation systems, whether it’s a road, a bridge, in some cases a tunnel — rather than buildings,” said Mitchell Moss, the director of the center and one of the authors of the study.

He draws a contrast with the occupations of schools, restaurants and administrative offices that commonly occurred during protests in the 1960s and 1970s, as an earlier generation rallied against segregated lunch counters or the Vietnam War.

Transportation, however, has long been central to the black civil rights movement, with the Selma march, the Freedom Rides, and Rosa Parks’s appeal to equal rights on public buses. Fifty years ago this summer, the March Against Fear inspired by James Meredith walked 220 miles of Southern roads from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

If anything is new, what’s different today may be the occupation of urban interstates for the purpose of bringing them to a standstill. Protesters in Selma, Moss argues, wanted to use the Edmund Pettus Bridge — on their way to Montgomery — not block it.

Reed, who angered many activists with his comments in Atlanta, later defended them on Facebook by saying that King prepared for weeks and worked with Selma officials to ensure public safety, rather than flooding the bridge in a spontaneous and “dangerous” way.

To the extent that activists today are committed to a more urgent kind of disruption, planning ahead with police would defeat some of the purpose of bringing daily life to an abrupt halt, calling attention to the fundamental structures of inequality. And it’s hard to imagine officials assenting ahead of time to closing an entire highway.

Highways also carry a particular resonance for the grievances today of black civil rights activists, given that many deadly encounters with police, such as Castile’s, began with traffic stops (this pattern has also prompted a new cry from transportation planners: “not in our name!”).

Historically, the same thing that happened in St. Paul — where the black Rondo neighborhood was destroyed — happened in Minneapolis, and Baltimore, and Oakland, and Atlanta, and in Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx’s childhood home of Charlotte.

[A crusade to defeat the legacy of highways rammed through poor neighborhoods]

Planner Robert Moses used highways to clear slums through poor and minority neighborhoods in New York. Mayor Richard J. Daley used the new Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago to wall off the old Irish white neighborhoods on the city’s South Side from the black neighborhoods to the east where the city built blocks and blocks of high-rise public housing.

Black neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s had little political power to block these engineering behemoths. And cities that wanted to redevelop poor neighborhoods — another government goal of the same era — got more federal money by building highways through them than by appealing for “urban renewal” funds.

“If your goal was to clear slums,” Connolly, the historian, said, “the best way to get bang for your buck was to use the highway as a slum clearance instrument.”

The resulting highways were then meant to speed whites who’d moved to the suburbs back and forth to jobs and attractions downtown, leapfrogging minority communities along the way. As Connolly suggested, they still serve this function today. And often, highways that passed through black communities weren’t planned with on- and off-ramps to them.

“They’re not designed for, nor do they serve, low-income communities who are actually already close to downtown,” said Brown University historian Robert Self. “If you live in West Oakland, you don’t need a freeway to get to downtown Oakland.”

This infrastructure that destroyed black communities then helped build white ones, in the form of far-flung bedroom communities that boomed once these roads made longer-distance commuting feasible. “Fremont exists before the freeway is built,” Self said of the town 25 miles south of Oakland. “But once you build it, then Fremont becomes this massive possibility. Or San Mateo, or Redwood City.”

Protesters in Washington who recognized this dynamic at the time objected to urban highways as “white men’s roads through black men’s homes.”

Even without knowing this history, the consequences of it in cities are evident today, feeding the frustration of communities that have been segregated and separated from schools or parks or prompt ambulance access. The Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago still divides neighborhoods and resources from one another, Carruthers laments. In Baltimore, black communities are still fighting for the resources their communities rely on — investments in public transit — as the state continues to prioritize highways that predominantly serve white communities.

In Charlotte and Miami, all that concrete still looms over minority neighborhoods.

“They’re massive, massive occupiers of space,” Self said of highways. “When you’re flying through them in a car, you don’t think ‘this is actually an entire block or two or three of housing that had to go for this to be there.’ But there was a historical moment when that was housing.”

People occupied these spaces long before they felt they had to occupy the roads we built on top of them.

1. Condoms are only 98% effective when used correctly.
2. Sugar can cause infections in the vagina. This means things like chocolate sauce, honey, and lubricants with glycerin can be harmful.
3. Having sex with an intoxicated person is legally rape in most US states, even if the person verbally consents. In the eyes of the law, drugs and alcohol impair your ability to consent to sex.
4. Unprotected anal sex is the most dangerous sex act when it comes to spreading STIs.
5. Not everyone can climax from oral sex or even likes oral sex. Don’t assume—ask your partner what they want!
6. Condoms expire! Check the date on the wrapper. Also, storing them in wallets is not a good idea (see #8)
7. If someone with a vagina has unprotected anal sex, semen can drip down into the vagina and pose a (slight, but still real) risk for pregnancy.
8. Do not keep condoms in your wallet. The friction and heat exposure of keeping them there can make them ineffective. Keep them somewhere cool, dry, and out of sunlight.
9. You should be tested for STIs with each new partner you have. Annual appointments are not enough protection if you have multiple partners in that time.
10. Having anal sex does not lead to a gaping asshole unless your partner is literally an elephant.
11. Sex with elephants is illegal. Don’t do that.
12. Masturbating while wearing a condom can help people with penises get used to wearing them before sex.
13. Penis size does not define your worth. It is not the be-all, end-all factor for most people.
14. In fact, lots of people with large penises have trouble having sex without hurting their partner since the average vagina size is 6”-8” when aroused (it’s only 3”-4” when not aroused!).
15. Your first time will almost definitely not be your best time. That’s okay, I promise.
16. Herpes and pubic lice can still infect you if a condom is used if testicles come in contact with a vuvla.
17. Only one out of three people can orgasm from receiving vaginal penetration alone. You’re not broken.
18. People with penises can orgasm without ejaculating.
19. The muscles in a vagina can be abnormally tense and cause intense pain when penetrated with a toy, penis, or tampon. This is called vaginismus and treatment for this includes relaxation therapy and using medical rods to help the muscles relax.
20. The number of sexual partners you have does not define you. This rule applies to all genders.
21. A diet of lots of dairy and meat can cause ejaculate to taste bad. Fruits that are very sweet (like pineapple) help combat this for some people. However, due to body chemistry, medications, and other factors, it might not always do the trick.
22. Dental dams make oral sex with someone with a vulva safer. They are thin sheets of latex and can be home-made by cutting the ends off a condom and slitting it lengthwise to make a alternative option if you don’t have access to dental dams.
23. The clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings in it. That’s twice that of a penis! So, go gently until encouraged to do otherwise.
24. Sex does not have to stop when someone ejaculates. Remove any condoms or clean up any mess, and keep going until everyone is satisfied!
25. Communication is the number one factor to a better, healthier sex life.
26. The hymen is not a bone, and does not break. It is a membrane layer that stretches. It can tear, which can lead to pain and bleeding. However, sex for the first time (or ever!) should never hurt. Go slower and focus on foreplay to increase natural lubrication.
27. Sexuality is fluid for a lot of people. Don’t worry about labels until you’re sure in your sexual and romantic interests. Explore freely and worry about terms later.
28. Orgasms release hormones that are natural pain-killers. This is why some menstruating people masturbate when they have cramps, because the body naturally reduces pain after an orgasm.
29. The hormones released also account for why some people cry or get very emotional after an intense orgasm. It’s totally normal.
30. There are limitless kinks in the world and so long as they are safe and consensual, there is nothing wrong with them.
31. Medications and mental health disorders can mess with your sex drive. Talk to your doctor if your sex drive has suddenly increased or decreased after starting a medication—there may be alternatives.
32. There is nothing “un-manly” or “gay” about enjoying anal play. Most men who try anal enjoy a little sensation in that area. People with penises also have a p-spot (prostate) and can have intense orgasms through anal penetration.
33. Always use lubrication generously to avoid vaginal or anal tearing.
34. Urinating after sex can reduce the risk of a UTI in people with vaginas.
35. Enjoying casual sex does not make you a bad person if you are up-front with your intentions and don’t maliciously seek to hurt others.
36. Condoms come in multiple sizes! It should never be loose or painfully tight.
37. Being sex-positive does not mean that everyone needs to enjoy sex. It simply promotes the happiness and sexual exploration (or non-exploration) of others.
38. Porn is not an educational guide to sex.
39. Certain positions feel better than others. Switch it up and find out what works for you and your partner(s).
40. Condoms are more likely to break if you don’t leave a reservoir tip for ejaculate.
41. Labia are often asymmetrical. Your long/uneven/poofy/dark labia are beautiful and there is nothing wrong with your body.
42. Up to 80% of people with a vagina can squirt with either g-spot or clitoral stimulation.
43. Drug store pregnancy tests are just as effective as brand name ones. In some cases, they’re even MORE effective.
44. Elevating your butt with pillows can make missionary sex easier for those of us with a big tummy or thick thighs.
45. Plan B does not work on people over a certain weight (160-175lbs).
46. There are safe alternatives to condoms or oral contraceptives. Talk to your doctor about your options.
47. Sex toys can open up a whole new world to folks willing to explore.
48. Orgasms can be highly psychological. Most people can’t climax when they’re upset or distracted.
49. Birth control can cause people to miss periods or spot in between periods.
50. Sex doesn’t have to be gentle if you don’t want it to be. There are healthy ways to explore rough sex or BDSM.