Dressing Your Infant in a Devil's Rejects Baby Firefly Costume
The single biggest myth in modern parenting is the delusion that your infant is a blank, cooperative canvas for your own deeply specific pop-culture obsessions. I discovered this entirely too late while trying to explain to a very judgmental woman...
So, Can Your Newborn Really Be Born With Teeth? (My Freakout)
The biggest, most universally accepted myth about giving birth is that you're going to be handed this perfect, squishy, entirely gummy little blob of a human. I fully believed this. I thought I had at least six solid months of...
The truth about putting a camo baby tee on your actual infant
I was sitting at my kitchen island at two in the morning last Tuesday, staring at my phone and losing my mind. I just wanted to buy a normal shirt for my son. But when you search for a baby...
RealCare Baby Simulators: The Brutal Truth About How They Work
I found it wedged between a moldy juice box and a soccer cleat in the back of my sister's Honda Odyssey. A stiff, heavy, unblinking plastic infant. My sixteen-year-old niece was slouched in the passenger seat, staring at it with...
My Honest Take On That Half Baby Half Kid Meme Phase of Parenting
I was sitting on the cold tile of my bathroom floor in Chicago at two in the morning. My son was outside the door, doing that specific hyperventilating sob because I had peeled his banana. He asked me to peel...
Choosing safe gold earrings studs for babies without panicking
My mother-in-law cornered me in the kitchen with a pair of twenty-two karat hoops, telling me it was tradition and that I was overthinking it. A few hours later, my old charge nurse texted me to say that piercing a...
To Past Jess: What to Know About That September 24th Birthday Plush
Dear Jess of six months ago: Right now, you're sitting cross-legged on the sticky floor of the Goodwill on Highway 84, aggressively Googling plush toy birthdates while your youngest tries to eat a rogue Cheeto off your shoe. You just...
Why Learning Pretty Little Baby Chords Beats Playing Mozart
Three years ago, I was sitting on my cheap living room rug, sweating through my nursing tank top, frantically trying to sync a Bluetooth speaker to a twelve-hour Spotify playlist called "Mozart For Genius Brain Development." My oldest son, the...
October 16 Beanie Baby Nostalgia: Cute Decor or Safety Hazard?
I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, sweating through my maternity shorts in my mom’s un-air-conditioned Texas attic, when she pulled out the holy grail of our 1990s retirement plan: a massive, cracked plastic tub full of Beanie Babies. I was up...