The midnight baby meme: surviving internet chaos and newborn life
Listen. The absolute worst thing you can do at 2:42 AM when your infant is staring at the ceiling like they owe it money is open a sleep training forum. I used to do this. I'd sit in the dark,...
A Letter To Myself About The Baby Humidifier Situation
Dear Jess of last November. You're currently standing in the baby aisle of Target at two in the morning, staring bleary-eyed at a wall of plastic water-blowing machines while your four-month-old sounds like a tiny, asthmatic pug in the shopping...
The 3 AM Eczema Meltdown That Changed How I Dress My Kids
It was 3:14 AM in a stuffy, overheated Airbnb in Zermatt, and I was wearing my husband Mark’s oversized Ramones t-shirt that still smelled vaguely like airplane air and desperation. Maya was four months old, and she was screaming a...
Debugging The Stomach Bug: A Dad's Guide To Pedialyte For Babies
There I was at 2:14 AM, standing in the kitchen in my boxers, holding a plastic cup of Portland tap water while my 11-month-old son aggressively formatted his own hard drive all over my shoulder. The dad-logic in my sleep-deprived...
Truths About the RSV Vaccine for Babies (And Surviving Winter)
There's a spectacularly dangerous lie told to first-time parents by well-meaning older relatives, usually delivered over a lukewarm cup of tea. They lean in conspiratorially and tell you that a mild winter cold is actually brilliant for building up a...
Why Everything TV Taught You About Baby CPR is Dead Wrong
I was standing at my kitchen island yesterday, quartering grapes for my three-year-old with the kind of frantic, sweaty precision you only develop after your firstborn nearly checked out over a piece of hidden plastic. I had some medical drama...
What A Baby Chimpanzee Actually Taught Me About Human Parenting
It was three in the morning in the postpartum ward. I was bleeding through a mesh pad, staring at my newborn son in his plastic bassinet, waiting for the maternal instinct software to finish downloading. I thought it would just...
The Reality Of The Baby Box Trend (Cardboard Beds To Alarms)
I once had a first-time mother in the maternity ward ask me if she should throw out her expensive solid wood crib because a parenting blog told her infants only thrive in cardboard boxes. She was holding a beautifully printed...
What Nobody Tells You About the Amazon Baby Registry Welcome Box
I was sitting on my living room floor, ankle-deep in cardboard boxes and packing peanuts, sweating through my maternity shirt in the middle of a brutal Texas July. I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with my oldest child—the one who's currently...