Magazine

A simple wooden play gym on a messy rug surrounded by organic toddler clothes.

How To Raise A Baby Dolphin Without Losing Your British Mind

At exactly 6:14 AM on a bleak Tuesday, I was standing in our London kitchen trying to enforce what a very expensive hardcover parenting book called a "structured learning boundary" while Maya systematically crushed a rice cake into the tile...

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Baby wearing a flowy baby doll top playing with a soft toy on a bamboo blanket

Debugging The Silhouette: Why My Kid Wears Baby Doll Tops

3:14 AM. I'm holding a piece of fabric that looks like a miniature maternity dress, trying to calculate the best trajectory for pulling it over my 11-month-old’s wildly thrashing head. It has a seam that stops abruptly right under the...

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Toddler looking into a brooder box of baby chicks

Raising Baby Chickens: A Reality Check Letter To My Past Self

There's a cardboard box vibrating in the passenger seat of my minivan, and it smells faintly of wood shavings and poor life choices. It’s early March, raining sideways here in rural Texas, and I'm staring at the steering wheel while...

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A single baby chick standing under a radiant heat plate

The 3 AM Reality of Raising a Baby Chick With a Toddler

It's three in the morning on a Tuesday. I'm standing over my bathroom sink with a warm, damp paper towel, delicately wiping dried feces off the backside of a baby chick. My husband is asleep. My toddler is asleep. I'm...

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Six-month-old baby safely gnawing on a slow cooked pork rib bone.

Why You Should Hand Your Six-Month-Old a Pork Rib Bone Today

My mother-in-law nearly dropped her chai when I handed my six-month-old a six-inch pork rib bone. We were sitting on the patio in late July. She looked at me like I had just handed the baby a loaded weapon. The...

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A bewildered dad trying to figure out why his baby is making weird hand gestures.

How Baby ASL Fixed Our 11-Month-Old's Communication Bugs

At 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, I was holding a perfectly warmed, 98.6-degree bottle of formula out like a peace offering, while my eleven-month-old son shrieked like a dial-up modem failing to connect. I tried the bottle again. He slapped...

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A scattered pile of wooden blocks on a living room rug next to a coffee cup

Analog QA Testing: Why I Replaced The Flashing Toys With Wood

It was exactly 3:14 AM when my bare heel made contact with the plastic singing cow. I was holding a half-asleep eleven-month-old, navigating the dark hallway by memory, when 180 decibels of synthesized banjo music erupted from the floorboards. The...

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A stressed dad holding a silicone panda teether while researching reptile facts on his phone

Letter to Past Marcus: Baby Rattlesnakes & Other Terrors

Hey Marcus from six months ago. It's me, future Marcus. You're currently sitting in the dark at 3:14 AM, the retina display of your phone burning a hole in your exhausted corneas because you tried to Google "best wooden baby...

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A tired dad trying to drink tea while twins dismantle the living room

The myth of the peacefully occupied infant (and how to survive a bu...

I currently have one foot planted firmly on a rogue piece of Tupperware, while the other is trying to gently slide a half-eaten rice cake out from under the sofa before the dog finds it. The twins, at two years...

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