Troubleshooting the Breathable Blanket for Newborns Paradox
I was standing in our Portland apartment's second bedroom—newly converted from my gaming office to a nursery—staring at a stack of fourteen folded textiles. Fourteen. My wife, Sarah, had washed, dried, and color-coordinated a mountain of fabric based on a...
The Absolute Messy Truth About Buying Toddler Short Pajamas
It was somewhere around 2:14 in the morning in the dead center of July, and our Texas air conditioner was loudly fighting a losing battle against the humidity. I was standing in the dark, wrestling a damp, fleece zip-up footie...
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...
The real deal about that green baby tee and toxic wellness fads
I was three hours into a night shift in the pediatric ER when a very tired, very trendy mom rushed in with an eight-month-old who was vibrating like a cheap pager. His resting heart rate was through the roof. After...
Why We Switched To Sleeping Bags For Infants (And You Should Too)
My mother-in-law told me to pile three heavy quilts on him because Portland nights are drafty and he was going to freeze. The exhausted NICU nurse at the hospital swaddled him so tightly in a receiving blanket that he looked...
The 3 AM Onesie Panic and the Magic of Japanese Baby Clothes
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday and I was wearing a pair of maternity leggings that had a crusty smear of Greek yogurt on the left thigh, staring down at my firstborn, Leo, who was screaming like I was...
The Messy Reality of Children's Neckerchiefs
My mother-in-law stood in my Chicago kitchen last November holding a knitted wool scarf, insisting that if I didn't wrap my son's neck immediately, the draft would settle in his chest and give him pneumonia. Three hours later, a woman...
Welche Wolle für Babydecke: The brutal truth about baby yarn
Listen, Priya from six months ago. You're sitting on the living room floor surrounded by twenty skeins of neon acrylic yarn you bought on a manic whim at a big box craft store. You think you're going to crochet the...