The Honest Truth About Giving Sugar Candy To Babies Before Two
Listen. My mother-in-law had a literal sugar babies candy poised right over my six-month-old's mouth at a family Diwali party last year. I intercepted that little caramel nugget like an off-duty linebacker. She looked at me like I'd just slapped...
Debugging Stage 1 Baby Food: A Dad's First Bites Protocol
It's 6:14 PM on a Tuesday, and I'm currently staring at a splatter of bright orange sweet potato puree on my kitchen ceiling. I'm trying to reverse-engineer the physics of how a human being weighing exactly 16.4 pounds managed to...
Surviving Big Baby Davis: Raising A Literal Ten-Pound Newborn
"Are you absolutely sure there's only one in there?" I was staring at the popcorn ceiling of my OB's office in rural Texas, slick with that freezing blue ultrasound gel, while the poor tech just kept measuring and re-measuring my...
Dear Past Marcus: Debugging the Baby Shower Meatballs Crisis
I've got a digital meat thermometer plunged into the geometric center of a frozen sphere of ground turkey, and the reading is hopelessly stuck at 138Β°F. It's 11:30 PM on a Friday. The kitchen smells like a confusing collision of...
The unspoken truth about baby rice cereal and starting solids
My mother-in-law was hovering by the kitchen island at two in the morning, holding a cardboard box of generic infant flakes and shaking it at my husband like it was a maraca. She whispered that if we just put a...
Why The Great Baby Oatmeal Cereal Incident Finally Broke My Spirit
It's 11:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I'm staring at a perfectly spherical glob of beige paste slowly sliding down my otherwise immaculate kitchen window. It hangs there for a moment, defying gravity, before dropping directly onto the cat's head....
The Great Sweet Potato Incident: A Very Messy Guide to First Foods
It was a Tuesday at exactly 2:14 PM, and I was wearing my husband Dave's gray college t-shirt that had a mysterious, crusty stain on the left shoulder. I was sitting at our kitchen island, staring blankly at the wall,...
Is Rosemary Safe for Babies? A Mom's Honest Story
I was staring at a twenty-four dollar bottle of "all-natural botanical" baby massage oil in my kitchen trash can at two in the morning while my oldest son, Beau, screamed bloody murder in the other room. His tiny back was...
What nobody tells you about babies and the great sugar debate
I was standing in my kitchen last Thanksgiving, elbow-deep in a massive pot of mashed potatoes, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mom unwrapping a little caramel log. She was aiming it right at my...