The Great Midnight Laundry Crash: Blankets and Baby Thermodynamics
I'm standing in our dimly lit basement laundry room at 2:14 AM, holding what used to be a piece of luxury textile, and it currently looks like a severely depressed, matted muppet. My wife is standing in the doorway, her...
The Hackney Standoff: Two Babies, One Urban Fox, Zero Dignity
At 5:43 AM on a drizzly Tuesday, I found myself in a high-stakes staring contest with a mangy urban fox. I was armed only with a lukewarm mug of instant coffee and two extremely confident toddlers who were aggressively wielding...
How a Single Bunny Blanket Took Our Entire Family Hostage
I'm currently upside down in the backseat of our Prius with a flashlight clamped between my teeth. It's 11:43 PM. My wife is standing on the porch holding a screaming eleven-month-old, and we're tearing the car apart because we lost...
Stop Trying to Swaddle With a Receiving Blanket
It was 3 AM in late January. The wind off Lake Michigan was rattling our bedroom windows, and my daughter was doing the newborn startle reflex thing. She looked like she was trying to conduct a tiny, frantic orchestra in...
The Real Reason Babies Never Actually Sleep With Custom Blankets
There's a massive disconnect between the baby gear you think you need before the kid arrives and the reality of keeping a tiny human alive. Before our son Leo was born, my mental image of fatherhood involved a lot of...
The Truth About Crocheted Baby Blankets (And Keeping Toes Attached)
It was 2am, roughly six weeks before the twins were due, and I was sweating profusely over a plastic hook and a spool of aggressively yellow yarn. I had somehow convinced myself that real fatherhood began with mastering basic patterns...
The 2024 Chinese Gender Calendar: My Costly First Trimester Mistake
When I was six weeks pregnant with my oldest, I was standing in my kitchen eating a dry piece of toast, trying to hold down my breakfast, when the unsolicited advice started rolling in. My mom walked in, took one...
Dear Past Jess: The Brutal Truth About Crochet Baby Blankets
You're currently sitting on the floor of the nursery surrounded by fifty dollars worth of mustard yellow yarn, crying because you dropped a stitch four rows back. I know this because I was you exactly six months ago, hugely pregnant...
Why I Attempted Babydecke Stricken (And Almost Lost My Mind)
My mother-in-law slapped a skein of neon acrylic on our kitchen island and told me it was indestructible. Three hours later, the guy at the local Portland yarn shop looked at me like I'd asked to poison the water supply...