Surviving the Minefield of Hispanic Baby Girl Names
The greatest lie they peddle in those glossy parenting magazinesβusually the ones featuring a serene mother in white linen looking lovingly at a perfectly clean infantβis that picking a name for your child is a beautiful, intuitive process. They suggest...
What the Gisele Bundchen Baby News Taught Me About Over-40 Pregnancy
It was a Tuesday, I was wearing yoga pants with an unidentifiable yogurt stain on the left knee, standing in the aisle at Target staring blankly at diaper cream when three different people gave me completely contradicting advice about having...
System Specs vs Reality: Surviving Your Comedic 11-Month-Old
It's 2:43 AM, and I'm holding a tiny human who's laughing hysterically at a completely blank wall. I'm staring at my phone's spreadsheet where I track his input/output logs and exact ambient room temperature (68.4 degrees, for the record), trying...
Why The Filter Baby Concept Actually Matters For Your Sanity
I was standing in our tiny primary bathroom, the exhaust fan rattling like a helicopter overhead, while my oldest son Wyatt screamed bloody murder. He wasn't even six months old yet. I had just pulled him out of the bathtub,...
The Truth About The Perfectly Put-Together Infant
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was wearing a maternity bra that hadn't been genuinely white since the Obama administration. My second kid, Maya, was exactly three weeks old and smack in the middle of a cluster-feeding...
Dear past me: What I wish I knew about raising happy Dutch babies
It's three in the morning and you're sitting on the edge of the glider in a freezing Chicago nursery. You're holding a screaming six-month-old who hasn't slept a solid stretch since he was born. You pull out your phone, desperate...
The Middle-of-the-Night Panic Search For Your Baby's First Tooth
I was staring at the ceiling of our Chicago apartment at 3:14 AM. The radiator was clanking. My son was gnawing on my collarbone like a starving hyena. His chin was a waterfall of drool, soaking right through my third...
The Truth About Taylor Swift and the Pressure on Women to Have Kids
When I was twenty-nine, I was sitting in a aggressively air-conditioned Starbucks wearing leggings that hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine since Tuesday, crying into a venti iced macchiato because I had just received three completely conflicting pieces...
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...