Surviving the Chaos of Smoking Baby Back Ribs With Toddlers
It was 4:13 PM on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and I was wearing my absolute favorite, completely impractical white linen top from Zara. I don't know why I wore white. It was an act of extreme hubris. My husband,...
A Letter to Myself About the Absurdity of Smocked Baby Clothes
Dear Tom of six months ago. I know exactly where you're right now. You're standing in the upstairs bathroom at your mother-in-law's house, holding Maya at arm's length over the porcelain sink. You're staring at a £75 hand-smocked, pale blue...
Raising A Linxia Baby: The Unfiltered Truth About Newborn Life
I was standing in the Target baby aisle at 9 PM on a Tuesday, completely dead inside, while my oldest son Jackson screamed against my chest in a carrier that I was probably wearing wrong. He was three weeks old....
The ugly truth about deep cleaning your reusable cloth diapers
I was standing over the changing table last November, the Chicago wind rattling the windowpanes, pulling a supposedly fresh cloth diaper off my toddler. It smelled exactly like the gerbil enclosure at a rundown pet store. I had washed that...
When Can You Tell the Gender of a Baby? A Dad's Data Timeline
I was sitting in my ergonomic office chair, hitting CMD+R on my Gmail inbox every forty seconds like I was waiting for a server deployment to finish. We were at week ten of the pregnancy. Somewhere in the cloud, a...
Debugging the Desert: Surviving a Baby Scorpion in the Nursery
It was 2:14 AM in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was scanning the baseboards of our Airbnb with a blacklight flashlight I had overnighted from Amazon, looking for what I can only describe as a hardware glitch in nature. My 11-month-old...
What I Wish I Knew Before Googling Dwarf Baby Tears
Dear Sarah of November 14th, currently sitting on the cold bathroom tile at 3:17 AM in yesterday's yogurt-stained Lululemon leggings. You have your phone in one hand and a screaming four-month-old Leo in the other, and you're desperately typing things...
Navigating The Difference Between Gas Bubbles And Baby Moving
It was 11:42 PM on a Tuesday, I was wearing Dave’s stained college sweatpants that smelled vaguely of old laundry detergent, and I was absolutely convinced there was an alien trying to claw its way out of my lower intestine....
That Cute Little Green Alien Herb is Definitely Not for Kids
I was standing in line at H-E-B last Tuesday, wrestling my squirming two-year-old on my hip while trying to order a baby shower gift for my cousin on my phone. She is completely obsessed with that Mandalorian show, so I...