What the Lindbergh baby taught me about nursery security
Listen, it's two in the morning in Chicago, the radiator is hissing like a dying snake, and I'm standing in my toddler's room staring at the window latch. I should be sleeping. Instead, I'm thinking about a homemade wooden ladder...
Dear Past Priya: The Truth About Social Security Baby Names
Listen. You're sitting in the sweltering heat of the Target parking lot on Elston Avenue, crying into a lukewarm chai because an influencer just named her kid the exact moniker you've been hoarding for eight months. I know you're devastated....
Why the thalidomide baby tragedy still dictates pregnancy rules
I was standing in aisle four of a aggressively crunchy Portland natural grocery store, holding a box of German herbal nausea pills that smelled like dirt and black licorice. Sarah was eight weeks pregnant. For the last seventy-two hours, she...
How to Talk About the Babi Yar Massacre Without Breaking Your Kids
I was standing at the kitchen island at 2:14 PM on a Tuesday, wearing my husbandβs stained college sweatshirt, trying to order a baby shower gift on my phone while Leo, who's four and completely feral, was repeatedly ramming a...
The NICU, My Sanity, And The Wild History Of The Coney Island Baby
3:17 AM. St. Jude's NICU. November. I was wearing my husband Dave's oversized grey hoodie that smelled distinctly like stale Dunkin Donuts and absolute panic, just sitting there staring at the translucent skin of my son Leo's tiny chest rising...
The Late-Night Rabbit Hole That Changed How I View "Toxic" Baby Gear
I was pinned beneath a sleeping 12-kilogram toddler, desperately trying to breathe as shallowly as possible so as not to wake her, when my casual 3am doomscrolling took a violently dark turn. I had been trying to search for some...
The midnight debugging of the rockabye baby lyrics
It's exactly 3:14 AM. The rain in Portland is doing that aggressive, sideways thing against the nursery window, and my son is currently running his four-month firmware update, which apparently means his system has completely forgotten how to execute a...
What Thalidomide Babies Taught Us About The Placenta Firewall
I was standing in aisle 14 of the Hawthorne Fred Meyer at 9 PM on a Tuesday, aggressively squinting at the back of a ginger supplement bottle while my pregnant wife dry-heaved in the passenger seat of our Subaru. She...
A 3 AM Deep Dive Into Sleep Coaches and 19th-Century Babies
The thermostat on the baby monitor says exactly 69.8 degrees, which is supposedly the good thermal threshold for an 11-month-old human, yet my daughter is currently thrashing against my chest like a malfunctioning Roomba. It's 2:14 AM. We're in the...