Why the movie Gone Baby Gone triggered my newborn panic mode
The monitor was finally silent. Kabir had been fighting sleep for three hours, doing that rigid back-arching exorcist move every time I tried to lower him into the crib. My husband and I slumped onto the couch in the dark,...
The day my mother's vintage toy hoard almost ruined our lives
I was elbow-deep in a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal on a miserable, sleeting Chicago afternoon when my mother dragged a black Hefty garbage bag into my apartment. She had the frantic, secretive energy of someone smuggling contraband across a border....
The Truth About Baby's Breath (And Why Pinterest Lied To You)
My hand was hovering roughly two millimeters above my son's chest, waiting for a movement that seemed to be taking centuries. The clock said 3:14 AM. The baby monitor cast a weird green glow over the room, making everything look...
What Nobody Tells You About Your Baby's Breath
When we brought Leo home from the hospital eleven months ago, I received exactly three pieces of contradictory advice about his respiratory system within a forty-eight-hour window. My mother told me to hold a tiny compact mirror under his nose...
The Real Story Behind Keeping Your Kid Alive in the Backseat
The discharge nurse was watching me. We were on level three of the Northwestern Memorial parking garage, the Chicago wind was howling through the concrete pillars, and my husband was weeping silently while trying to wrestle a five-pound infant into...
The 3am Accutane Baby Panic: Skincare, Pregnancy, and Paranoia
The bathroom tiles were freezing against my bare legs, but the cold barely registered because I was staring at two things: a plastic stick with two faint pink lines, and a half-empty tube of prescription acne cream. It was 3:17...
The 3 AM Breaking Point and the Truth About Shaken Baby Syndrome
There's a very specific frequency of noise that two eight-week-old humans can achieve simultaneously, and I'm fairly certain it violates several international treaties. It was a Tuesday, somewhere around 3:14 in the morning, and I was pacing the hallway of...
Why bringing a baby to a Lil Baby concert is a terrible idea
My cousin Neha spent three days hovering over her laptop trying to score lil baby concert tickets. She finally secured two floor seats for the lil baby concert atlanta stop, then casually texted me a screenshot of her cart with...
Why My First Stair Gate Was a Complete Disaster and Other Confessions
I dropped an entire basket of freshly folded onesies right at the bottom of the steps when I saw it. My oldest son, Carterβwho's now five and still the absolute poster child for why I've gray hairβwas nine months old...