What I Wish I Knew Before Buying The Baby Bogg Bag Last Summer
Dear Sarah from last June. You're currently standing in the gravel parking lot of the municipal pool, wearing those distressed denim shorts you swore you were going to throw away in 2019, holding a soggy canvas tote that just aggressively...
My brutally honest guide to your baby store near me search
I was thirty-seven weeks pregnant, sweating profusely through a thin maternity top in a strip mall off the Kennedy Expressway. I had just desperately typed a search for the closest local baby shop into my phone, completely convinced that walking...
The Great Wheeled Walker Delusion (And What We Do Instead)
My mother-in-law proudly dragged it out of her attic last Tuesday like she was presenting me with the Holy Grail of parenting. It was a plastic, UFO-looking contraption with eight swiveling casters, a faded sticker of a bear, and a...
The Only Survival Gear You Actually Need for a Newborn
I was standing in the middle of aisle four with that stupid plastic scanning gun in my hand, watching my husband happily zap a $400 wipe warmer. I had to physically pry the scanner out of his grip. My brain...
The Brutal Truth About Baby Products From A Tired Nurse
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday. I was sitting on my Chicago apartment floor surrounded by thirty-two cardboard boxes of varying sizes, smelling vaguely of spit-up and fenugreek. My son was three weeks old and screaming in that specific...
The Real Truth About Finding A Hardware Mounted Baby Gate With Door
My mother-in-law told me I didn't need one because, in her day, they just watched their kids. The neighborhood Facebook group insisted I needed a custom, four-hundred-dollar lucite barricade imported from Sweden. Then my old charge nurse from the pediatric...
Why I Hosed Down Our Newton Baby Crib Mattress at 2 AM
It was 3:14 AM. The infrared glow of the Nanit monitor showed a gray, pixelated blob that used to be my daughter, but now she was completely face-down. Smashed directly into the mattress fibers. I watched the screen, waiting for...
The Brutal Truth About Hip Carriers From a Broken Twin Dad
Tuesday, 4:15 PM. The rain is pelting the roof of my battered estate car in the Waitrose car park. One twin is arching her back like an angry prawn, absolutely refusing to be extracted from her baby car seat. The...
Troubleshooting the hardware of your very first infant car seat
My wife's contractions were six minutes apart upstairs in room 412 of Legacy Emanuel, and I was down in the subterranean hospital parking garage violently wrestling a molded plastic base into the backseat of my Subaru. The Portland rain was...