Magazine
A letter to myself about thrush in babies and the white spots
You're sitting on the edge of the glider at 3 a.m. with your phone flashlight pointed into a sleeping mouth. You're trying to pry his tiny jaw open without waking him, which is as impossible as it sounds. His lips...
The ugly truth about the peachy baby slime trend
My sister-in-law swore the viral slime was a sensory miracle that would make my toddler a genius. The neighborhood mom-group president warned us it was highly toxic chemical waste that would melt our floors. Then my old ER charge nurse...
Debugging Infant Sleep With The Taking Cara Babies Framework
The glow of my phone screen at 3:14 AM was the only light in the room, illuminating my desperate, one-thumbed Google search: taking cara babi sleep help please. Outside, the endless Portland drizzle was doing its best to act as...
What the Heck is a Sugar Baby (And Why My Kitchen is Sticky)
I was standing at my kitchen island yesterday, scraping dried oatmeal off the counter with a thumbnail while trying to fulfill three Etsy orders for custom nursery signs, when I nearly dropped my phone into a lukewarm mug of coffee....
Solly Baby Wrap Setup: A Dad's Guide to Not Dropping the Kid
It was raining, because it's always raining in Portland, and I was standing next to my Subaru holding a screaming eight-pound potato while seventeen feet of buttery soft fabric aggressively soaked up a puddle of dirty rainwater. My wife watched...
The Real Shiva Baby Dilemma: Taking Infants to Solemn Events
"Leave 'em at the house," my grandma told me over the phone, her voice crackling through the spotty rural Texas cell service. "Take them, babies represent the circle of life!" my mother-in-law insisted the very next day while aggressively shoving...
How To Survive The Santa Baby Phase Without Losing Your Sanity
There I was, sweating profusely through my favorite flannel shirt in a seventy-five-degree Texas December, trying to wedge my screaming firstborn into a faux-fur trimmed sequin outfit while Eartha Kitt purred the santa baby lyrics from my phone speaker perched...
Don't Give Your Kid That 1997 Purple Bear
I was standing in my mom's sweltering Texas attic last July, sweating through my t-shirt, while she rummaged through a stack of plastic storage bins. She finally pulled out a Ziploc bag with the reverence of someone handling the Declaration...
What no one tells you about bringing a jaundice baby home
My mother-in-law told me to put him in the living room window like a houseplant. The hospital lactation consultant told me to feed him until my nipples literally fell off. My deeply sleep-deprived husband downloaded three different tracking apps, poking...