A letter to my May self about the great toddler shorts strike
Listen, May Priya. You're sitting on the rug right now, watching your kid sweat through a pair of heavy fleece joggers while the Chicago spring decides to skip straight to eighty-five degrees and eighty percent humidity. You're holding a pair...
Spielzeug für 3-Jährige: Ein ehrlicher Survival-Guide
Meine Mutter rief gestern aus dem Nichts an und meinte, wir bräuchten für meine Nichte Clara sofort eine 1,50 Meter hohe Plastikküche mit elektronischen Brutzelgeräuschen, weil sie jetzt in "diesem Alter" sei. Unser Nachbar, dessen Kinder irgendwie immer aussehen, als...
Before & After: My Take on Spielzeug ab 2 Jahren for Toddlers
I was standing in the kitchen at 6:45 AM, holding a battery-operated plastic dump truck over the trash can like a priest performing an exorcism. My oldest was two at the time, and this truck had been singing the exact...
Surviving the Night Sweats: A Dad’s Guide to Bamboo Blankets
It was 2:14 AM in the middle of a freak Portland August heatwave, and the Nanit camera monitor above the crib was glowing with a red 78-degree warning. My son, who was about eight weeks old at the time, was...
How to survive the kinderzimmer einrichten phase without losing it
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant when I sat on the bare floor of our second bedroom in Chicago and cried over the smell of a dresser. We had just assembled a suspiciously cheap piece of nursery furniture I bought online....
My Desperate Search for "Spielzeug für 1 Jährige" (Toys)
Yesterday at 5:14 AM, I staggered into the living room to grab a burp cloth and stepped directly onto a plastic cow that immediately began mooing "Old MacDonald" in a haunting, battery-depleted baritone. My 11-month-old daughter, sitting in her playpen,...
Spielzeug ab 3 Jahren: The Brutally Honest Guide for Parents
There I was, barefoot in my own living room at 6:30 in the morning, stepping squarely on a tiny plastic firefighter hat that came with some massive, overpriced fire truck my oldest got for his third birthday. I’m just gonna...
Why buying boys dress pants is a specific kind of modern torture
I'm currently wedged next to the sanitary bin in the disabled toilet of a twelfth-century Surrey church, sweating completely through my only clean wedding suit, attempting to wrestle a screaming two-year-old into a pair of miniature, fiercely rigid navy slacks....
Why I Stopped Trusting the Internet About Early Development Toys
When my son was about four days old, my mother-in-law bought us a plastic command center that flashed strobe lights and yelled the alphabet in a robotic British accent. "He needs cognitive stimulation," she told me with absolute certainty. The...