The brutal truth about baby cough medicine and what actually works
At 2:14 AM on a Tuesday, I was standing in my dark kitchen holding a thrashing, coughing toddler while my phone lit up with three different text threads. My mom was typing paragraphs about rubbing warm mustard oil on his...
Why Every Baby Math Formula Is Basically Lying To You
It was 3:14 AM, and I was sitting on the nursery floor wearing my husband Mark’s oversized gray college sweatpants—the ones with the mystery bleach stain on the knee—aggressively typing numbers into my glowing phone screen while my coffee from...
Dear Past Me: Finding Sanity With the Baby Buddha Breast Pump
Dear Priya from six months ago. You're currently sitting on the cold bathroom tiles at 3 AM. The heavy white plastic box of your standard issue insurance pump is plugged into the wall, trapping you within a three-foot radius of...
The Honest Dad's Guide to Surviving the Baby Beach
At exactly 8:14 AM last Tuesday, I found myself standing at the edge of the dunes in West Sussex, carrying three oversized tote bags, a cooler, a parasol, and two shrieking two-year-old girls who had just discovered that wind exists....
Why You Should Hand Your Six-Month-Old a Pork Rib Bone Today
My mother-in-law nearly dropped her chai when I handed my six-month-old a six-inch pork rib bone. We were sitting on the patio in late July. She looked at me like I had just handed the baby a loaded weapon. The...
Sorting Through the Utter Chaos of Buying Preemie Baby Clothes
I was standing at the hospital sink scrubbing my hands for the fiftieth time that Tuesday, staring at a crumpled plastic bag of tiny garments. My mom had just called to cheerfully suggest I just buy standard newborn sizes because,...
Decoding Infant Sleep Audio: My War With Sound Machines
It's 3 AM and I'm hovering over my eleven-month-old's crib with a free NIOSH decibel meter app glowing ominously on my phone, watching the needle spike into the red zone. My wife is standing in the doorway in her robe,...
When Does a Baby Have a Heartbeat? The Real Truth From a Mom
I'm sitting on the cold bathroom tile at two in the morning, seven-ish weeks pregnant with my oldest son, covered in cheap aloe vera gel I panic-bought on Amazon. I'm aggressively jabbing a forty-dollar plastic at-home fetal doppler into my...
Dear past Priya: Your flat head baby is going to be just fine
You're sitting on the bathroom tiles at 2 AM. You've just zoomed in on the Nanit monitor until the pixels blurred into a gray soup, staring intensely at the back of your son's skull. One side looks distinctly like a...