How Many Bibs Do I Need? A Tech Dad’s Guide To Drool Mathematics
Tuesday, 3:14 AM. I'm standing in our freezing laundry room holding a tiny, sour-milk-soaked triangle of fabric by two fingers, staring into the dark void of the dryer drum. My wife is upstairs walking our screaming 11-month-old in tight circles,...
The Ugly Truth About My First Custom Organic Baby Onesie
I was standing in the middle of my kitchen, covered in a highly suspicious mixture of mashed sweet potatoes and spit-up, trying to peel a personalized milestone shirt off my oldest son, Leo. It was his half-birthday, because I used...
Why most kids' clothes are actually a trap disguised as cute
It was 2:13 a.m. in the middle of a brutal Chicago February. The thermostat claimed it was sixty-eight degrees, but the nursery felt like a meat locker. I was holding my screaming son at arm's length because he was covered...
What the hospital ruined about my cozy baby blanket fantasies
I'm currently staring at a hand-knit, cable-stitch monstrosity that my great-aunt sent from Delhi. It weighs about as much as a small dog. Before nursing school, before I had a child of my own who treats sleep like a hostile...
Why I Finally Swapped My Gold Chain for a Mother Teething Necklace
We were at a coffee shop in Wicker Park last Tuesday when I saw it. A perfectly nice woman at the next table wrestled a string of Baltic amber beads around her six-month-old's chubby neck. I took a slow sip...
Surviving Chicago Winters With a Long Sleeve Baby Girl Bodysuit
I'm standing by the changing table in our drafty apartment. It's mid-November, the wind is howling off Lake Michigan, and my six-day-old daughter is screaming. She looks like a furious, wrinkled potato. My mother had lovingly shipped a box of...
Why I Threw Away Every Regular Onesie During the First Month
It was day three postpartum with my oldest, and I was sweating like a sinner in church. He was screaming that high-pitched, breathless newborn wail. He'd just delivered a mustard-yellow blowout of epic proportions. I was staring at his umbilical...
The Blanket Stroller Mistake: Why I Stopped Making Pram Nap Tents
It was exactly 2:14 PM on a Tuesday, and my weather app claimed it was 81.4 degrees in southeast Portland. My eleven-month-old son was in the middle of a sleep regression that felt like a malicious firmware update, and I...
Debugging the Base Layer: A Dad’s Guide to Bodysuit Blanks
Before my son was born, I received three distinct pieces of base-layer advice that completely crashed my internal logic board. My mother insisted I needed to wrap the baby in three layers of fleece because our Portland house is drafty....