Magazine

Baby wearing a flowy baby doll top playing with a soft toy on a bamboo blanket

Debugging The Silhouette: Why My Kid Wears Baby Doll Tops

3:14 AM. I'm holding a piece of fabric that looks like a miniature maternity dress, trying to calculate the best trajectory for pulling it over my 11-month-old’s wildly thrashing head. It has a seam that stops abruptly right under the...

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A 15-inch soft cloth baby doll sitting on a nursery floor next to wooden toys.

What Pediatric Nurses Actually Think About Your Bitty Baby Doll

I was working the Tuesday afternoon shift at the clinic when a panicked mother brought in her eighteen-month-old and a heavy, suspiciously damp cloth doll. The waiting room was already packed with the usual winter crud, but this case stood...

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Toddler pushing a heavy wooden pram across a living room floor

The ugly truth about buying your toddler a baby doll stroller

There was a tiny pool of blood on my hardwood floor. Not a catastrophic amount, just enough to make my old hospital triage instincts override my standard maternal panic. Maya was on her back, screaming, holding a split lip. Tangled...

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A tired pregnant mother drinking coffee while her toddler plays aggressively with a soft toy on the rug.

The Great Toddler Empathy Crisis and My Stained Maternity Shirt

I was exactly thirty-four weeks pregnant with Maya, sweating profoundly through a mustard-yellow maternity top that had a coffee stain shaped exactly like Florida right on the collarbone. It was 3:14 PM on a Tuesday, which is universally the worst...

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A toddler practicing holding a realistic reborn baby doll on a playmat

Why a Reborn Baby is Actually the Ultimate Parenting Hack

There I was at 2 AM, staring at a browser tab filled with pictures of hyper-realistic infant dolls, fully convinced the sleep deprivation from my second pregnancy had finally cracked my brain. The glow of the laptop was illuminating the...

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Toddler aggressively dragging a realistic baby doll by the ankle

Why that hyper-realistic baby doll is a terrible idea for your kid

Listen. I was standing in my friend Maya's kitchen last Tuesday when she proudly unboxed a four-hundred-dollar reborn silicone infant for her two-year-old. The thing had hand-painted translucent veins, micro-rooted eyelashes, and the exact dead weight of a sleeping newborn....

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A toddler sitting on a rug dressing a soft body doll in an organic cotton bodysuit

Dear past me: The ugly truth about the bitty baby

Dear Priya of six months ago. You're currently sitting on the floor of the Target toy aisle while Maya has a full code blue meltdown over a generic plastic doll with terrifying eyelashes. You're rubbing your temples, staring at the...

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Toddler twin girls in London flat playing with soft baby dolls on the floor

Why baby dolls took over my flat (and what the science says)

I'm currently staring at a small, disembodied plastic leg poking out from beneath our sofa. It belongs to ‘Baby Susan’, a doll who has suffered more blunt force trauma in the past three weeks than an amateur rugby player. If...

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Toddler boy aggressively putting a hat on a lifelike silicone baby doll on a messy living room rug

Why a Creepy Lifelike Baby Doll Saved My Sanity With Sibling Prep

I was sitting on my incredibly stained West Elm rug at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, wearing maternity leggings that definitely had dried yogurt on the left thigh, watching my three-year-old son Leo attempt a WWE-style suplex on...

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