Magazine
Dear Past Tom: Why Using Baby Oil as Lube is a Terrible Idea
Dear Past Tom, It's 11:14 PM on a freezing Tuesday in November. By some absolute miracle of the parenting gods, the twins are both asleep at the exact same time. Maya, who usually treats sleep as a mild suggestion, has...
Is the Baby of the Year Scam Actually Stealing Your Data?
My phone buzzed for the fourth time before 9 AM, and I nearly dropped a spit-up covered burp cloth right into my fresh mug of coffee. It was another group text from my cousin, begging our entire extended family to...
Navigating Modern Baby Safety in a Wild World (And My Anxiety)
My mother-in-law told me yesterday that if I even let Maya look at an iPad before she's twelve, I'm basically frying her frontal lobe and guaranteeing she won't get into college. Then, literally an hour later, my best friend texted...
The 2 AM Snot Panic and the Alligator Wrestling Match
I was sitting in the rocking chair at two in the morning, holding my oldest kid when he was just three weeks old, and he sounded exactly like a forty-pound pug who had just run a marathon in the Texas...
The absolute exhaustion of finding truly unique baby names
The lady from medical records was tapping her pen against her clipboard, shifting her weight from one Dansko clog to the other. I was forty-eight hours postpartum, sweating through a hospital gown that smelled like iodine, holding the birth certificate...
The brutally honest guide to choosing baby names boy edition
There's a pervasive, highly destructive lie floating around the maternity wards and NCT classes of Britain, and it goes something like this: don't worry if you haven't picked a name yet, because the second they hand him to you, you'll...
The Real Deal on Baby Name Meanings Without Losing Your Mind
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, sweating through a maternity tank top in the middle of July, when the great naming summit occurred in my living room. My mom looked me dead in the eye and said I needed to pick...
Why I Let a Computer Name My Kids and Tossed the Giant Books
I was sitting on the floor of our half-painted nursery in the dead of a Texas July, sweating through my maternity leggings, when I aggressively hurled a 1,000-page naming dictionary across the room at my husband. It missed him, thankfully,...
Surviving a Baby MRI: A London Dad's Letter to His Past Self
Dear Tom from six months ago, You're currently standing in the kitchen at 4:13 am, covered in what I desperately hope is just standard-issue reflux, staring at a crumpled NHS appointment letter. Baby M is asleep on your left shoulder,...