How to Serve Baby Shower Food Without Poisoning the Mother
There's a pervasive, Pinterest-fueled lie that catering a baby shower is an exercise in elegant pastel minimalism involving delicate cucumber sandwiches and unbothered women laughing in sunlit rooms. It's actually a high-stakes hostage negotiation with bacteria where one wrong slice...
What Will My Baby Look Like (And Other Late Night Mysteries)
I was thirty-four weeks pregnant, sitting in the dark at two in the morning, paying a sketchy app five dollars to merge my face with my husband's. The result loaded on my phone screen and I just stared at it....
What Is a Rainbow Baby? The Complicated Truth
The monitor is beeping a steady, boring 145 beats per minute, but the woman on the paper-covered table is still holding her breath. She has her eyes squeezed shut, her hands gripping the plastic edges of the bed so hard...
The Midnight Panic: When Your Kid Finally Starts Kicking In There
It was exactly 2:14 AM. I know this because I was staring obsessively at the red digital clock on our microwave while sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor. I was wearing my husband’s oversized, threadbare college t-shirt, crying softly into...
The Great Flatlay Disaster: Twin Baby Announcement Ideas
The ultrasound gel was alarmingly cold, but that wasn't what made me stop breathing. It was the sudden, incredibly protracted silence from Janet, the NHS sonographer who had been cheerfully chatting about her spaniel just moments before. She squinted at...
How to Choose Cute Baby Girl Names Without Losing Your Mind
We're sitting in the parking lot of a Texas Roadhouse in the dead of August. I'm 38 weeks pregnant, sweating through a maternity shirt I bought on clearance, and absolutely sobbing into a to-go container of buttered rolls. Why? Because...
That viral stone baby video is lying to you about pregnancy
It's two in the morning and I'm watching my toddler practice his mixed martial arts kicks in his sleep while my phone screen illuminates the dark. The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that what a tired mother really...
The truth about baby bump timelines and why apps lie to you
I was standing in our kitchen holding a retractable Stanley tape measure against my wife's stomach, trying to log exactly how many centimeters her abdomen had grown since the previous Tuesday. She looked down at me like I was trying...
When Can You Feel Baby Move? The Real Truth About First Kicks
I was seventeen weeks pregnant with my oldest, sitting in my Chevy Tahoe in the Target parking lot, aggressively jabbing myself in the stomach with two fingers. An app on my phone, which I really shouldn't have trusted to begin...