Magazine
My 3am breakdown over finding genuinely rare monikers for daughters
It was 3:14 in the morning, the glow of my MacBook illuminating the half-eaten Hobnob resting dangerously close to my wife's massive, third-trimester bump. We were locked in a vicious, whispered argument over whether "Lyra" sounded too much like "liar"...
Raising a Brilliant Kid Without Buying Into All the Crazy Hype
I was sitting on my living room rug with my firstborn, sweating through my t-shirt while aggressively waving a black-and-white contrast flashcard in his face like I was trying to land a plane on a runway. He was four months...
The Complete Disaster of Buying a Baby Gate for Stairs
I'm halfway down the staircase, suspended entirely in mid-air at 2:14 in the morning, clutching a sticky bottle of strawberry Calpol in one hand and a shrieking twenty-pound toddler in the other. My left foot has just hooked firmly under...
The absolute hell of buying baby furniture (and what to buy)
It was 2017, I was twenty-four weeks pregnant with Maya, and I was sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor of a massive warehouse store crying into a half-empty iced oat milk latte. I was wearing these atrocious grey Target maternity...
What a Baby Flamingo Taught Me About the 50/50 Parenting Split
The digital meat thermometer flashed 98.6 degrees, which meant the bottle of pumped breastmilk I was holding was exactly best for human consumption. It was 3:17 AM on a Tuesday, the Portland rain was actively trying to dissolve our bedroom...
What the Baby Emmanuel News Actually Taught Me About Motherhood
I was wearing my husband's stained college sweatshirt, the one with the frayed cuffs that permanently smells like sour milk, sitting on the cold hexagonal tiles of our guest bathroom at 3:14 AM while Leo screamed in the next room....
Dear Jess: The Unfiltered Truth About Buying Baby Detergent
Dear Jess from six months ago, I see you standing there in aisle 14 of the H-E-B in Corsicana, completely frozen. You've got your two-year-old hanging off the front of the shopping cart trying to eat a bruised banana, your...
Surviving a baby coyote encounter with jetlagged twin toddlers
It was 4:17 in the morning in suburban California, and I was losing my mind. We had foolishly decided to drag our two-year-old twin girls on a twelve-hour flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles to visit my wife's brother, operating...
Why I Stopped Buying $45 Polyester Baby Pumpkins (And What I Do Now)
There I was, sitting on the porch steps in the humid Texas heat, trying to pry a screaming six-month-old out of a rigid polyester pumpkin suit that somehow didn't have a single snap at the crotch. My oldest daughterβwho's now...