The clinical and emotional reality of dead babies in our world
Before I had my own kid, I thought I understood how the worst-case scenario worked. I used to sit in the pediatric ICU breakroom at three in the morning, drinking lukewarm coffee out of a styrofoam cup, charting the vital...
System Error: Why We Banned the Baby's Breath Flower at Home
My mother-in-law texted me four massive paragraphs about how Gypsophila represents everlasting love and is a hard requirement for the nursery design if we wanted to respect tradition. Three hours later, our Portland neighborβa guy who brews his own seasonal...
Why treating your kid like a tiny primate actually makes sense
Listen, I spent four months before my son was born curating a gender-neutral nursery that looked like a Scandinavian meditation retreat. It was silent, mostly beige, and smelled faintly of expensive lavender. I folded the organic swaddles into perfect little...
The Skai Jackson Drama & Real Talk On Postpartum Stress
When I was six months pregnant with Mayaβwho's now seven and currently trying to teach our golden retriever how to use my husband's iPadβI got three very distinct pieces of unsolicited advice in the span of one Tuesday. My mother-in-law...
What Three Wise Men and a Baby Gets Right About Real Parenting
My mom told me to keep him wrapped up tight in a heavy blanket so he wouldn't catch a draft. My mother-in-law, bless her heart, insisted he needed to "breathe" in the ninety-degree Texas heat and tried to strip him...
Debugging Infant Water Safety and the Sea Otter Parenting Method
I'm currently losing a wrestling match with a wet, angry noodle on a bench that smells aggressively of bleach. My eleven-month-old son has somehow managed to triple his body weight purely through the physics of being slippery, and the acoustic...
What I wish I knew about elephant parenting six months ago
The timer on the phone says four minutes and twelve seconds. You're standing in the dark hallway outside the nursery, staring at the baseboard, listening to him scream. Your shoulders are touching your earlobes. You know the sleep training protocols...
The Baby Cow Confusion: Milk Rules and Adorable Bovine Trends
It was 2018, I was wearing a stained nursing tank that smelled faintly of sour yogurt, and I made the ultimate rookie parenting mistake. Leo was ten months old, we were completely out of his usual formula, and it was...
What a 1980s Movie Taught Me About Dads and Newborns
Dear Sarah from last October, You're currently sitting in the driver's seat of your Honda Odyssey in a Starbucks parking lot. You're wearing those black Lululemon leggings that have an unidentifiable crusty stain on the left thigh, clutching an iced...