Cincinnati Zoo Gladys Gorilla Baby Birth & Postpartum Chaos
It was 3:14 in the morning, I had a streak of questionable yellow spit-up drying on my left shoulder, and my oldest was throwing an absolute fit in the next room because his favorite dinosaur sock fell off in his...
The Great Baby Doppler Debug: Why I Stopped Tracking Heartbeats
My mother told me that if I just pressed a toilet paper tube against my wife’s belly, I could hear the baby’s heartbeat perfectly. A senior developer on my team swore by buying a discarded clinical-grade ultrasound machine off eBay...
The Absolute Messy Truth About Finding Unique Baby Names in 2024
I was thirty-two weeks pregnant, sitting at the nurse station at Northwestern Memorial, staring blankly at a patient chart. The poor kid had a name with five consecutive consonants and a silent q. My shift was ending, my ankles looked...
when can u find out babys gender (and the bathroom floor incident)
I was sitting on the cold hexagonal tiles of our half-bathroom at exactly 8:14 PM on a Tuesday, wearing Dave’s stained college sweatpants, aggressively squeezing my own index finger while trying not to pass out. There was blood on the...
When Your Baby Refuses to Flip (My Honest Breech Experience)
I was thirty-six weeks pregnant with my oldest when the ultrasound tech got real quiet, typed something furiously on her little keyboard, and excused herself to get the doctor. Cut to twenty minutes later in the H-E-B parking lot where...
What the Adriana Smith Baby Case Taught Me About ER Visits
It was 11:45 PM on a Tuesday, and I was standing at my kitchen island slapping shipping labels onto poly mailers for my Etsy shop while the baby monitor glowed next to my tape dispenser. I should have been sleeping,...
Why my baby due date calculator was a massive, statistical lie
The bathroom tile was unforgivingly cold against my bare feet, but I barely noticed because I was staring at a plastic stick with two faint blue lines, desperately stabbing at my phone screen. I had just Googled "baby due date...
The Complicated Reality of Expecting After a Loss
The paper sheet on the examination table crinkled with a sound so violently loud it seemed to echo off the drab walls of the University College Hospital fetal medicine unit. It was a Tuesday, it was raining in that relentless,...
The 3 AM pregnancy panic and why I downloaded the baby billy app
It's 3:14 AM. I'm thirty-three weeks pregnant, sweating through my supposedly breathable sheets, and my kid hasn't moved in forty-two minutes. My husband is snoring next to me, completely oblivious to the fact that I'm spiraling into a web of...