Dear Past Marcus: You Need a Baby Bjorn Bouncer Immediately
Past Marcus, it's me. You from six months in the future. You're currently standing in the kitchen of our Portland apartment at 3:14 AM. The baby is five weeks old. It's raining outside, obviously. You're trying to rock him while...
The Great Gerber Baby Myth and The Reality of Infant Parenting
I'm currently staring at a smear of what I think is pureed sweet potato on my kitchen ceiling. I don't know how it got up there. My son is eleven months old, sits exactly thirty-two inches below that spot in...
Why that classic seated baby walker is actually a terrible idea
Last Diwali, my mother-in-law cornered me near the samosas with a brightly colored plastic catalog she had acquired from god knows where. She flipped to a dog-eared page and pointed to a massive plastic saucer surrounded by wheels and covered...
What I Wish I Knew Before Buying That Magical Baby Swing
Itβs 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in November, and I'm standing in my kitchen wearing a pair of Target maternity leggings from 2014 that smell aggressively like sour milk, holding a lukewarm mug of yesterdayβs coffee, just absolutely paralyzed while...
The Only Things You Actually Need For A New Baby (And What To Skip)
"You absolutely need the wipe warmer," my sister-in-law hissed across the table, leaning in like she was giving me state secrets. "If a cold wipe touches that baby's bottom, you'll never sleep again." "Don't buy anything," my hippie neighbor countered...
The Truth About Targetβs Baby Registry From a Tired Dad
I'm standing in our London flat at 2am, holding an iPad my American mother-in-law mailed across the Atlantic, staring at a digital spreadsheet that's fifty rows deep in burp cloths alone. My wife is asleep on the sofa, heavily pregnant...
Buying schΓΆne kleider fΓΌr kinder: A dad's dress debugging
It was 7:14 AM on a Tuesday when the mobility crisis officially peaked. My eleven-month-old daughter, Maya, was stranded in the middle of our living room rug, her knees firmly pinned to the floor by an excessive layer of synthetic...
Dear Past Me: The Truth About That Newborn Jumper Fantasy
Dear Tom of six months ago, You're currently sitting on the hallway floor of our terribly drafted London flat at 3:14 in the morning. Your left shoulder smells aggressively of sour milk, your right knee is entirely numb from the...
Spielzeug Kinder 2 Jahre: Surviving the Toddler Toy Explosion
I was standing in the dark hallway at 3 AM holding a laundry basket full of spit-up stained onesies when my heel came straight down on a plastic light-up police car that screamed "WEE-WOO PUT YOUR HANDS UP" into the...