Surviving 29 Weeks: From Butternut Squashes to Tiny Terrorists
I'm currently watching a piece of steamed sweet potato make its third, highly ambitious trajectory across my kitchen, propelled by the shockingly strong left arm of a child who, until very recently, was basically a sentient bag of flour. If...
Stop Crying Over Baby Weight: A Letter to My Sleep-Deprived Self
Dear Jess from six months ago, I see you. You're standing barefoot in the master bathroom at 3 AM. You're completely naked, holding a screaming, naked infant. You step on the cold digital scale, squinting in the dark to read...
Decoding Baby Vocals 3 Months In: A Nurse's Guide to Cooing
I was standing in the dark at three in the morning, holding a screaming potato of a human, trying to follow advice from a very expensive parenting app. The app told me that early language development requires measured, calm adult...
Staring At Walls: The Blurry Truth About Baby Vision Development
It was 3 AM on a Tuesday in 2017, and I was wearing a gray maternity tank top from Target that smelled strongly of sour milk, stale coffee, and raw desperation. The house was entirely silent except for the rhythmic,...
The Baby Steps Metacritic: Stop Treating Walking Like A Game
I was sitting on a damp park bench in Wicker Park last Tuesday, nursing a lukewarm coffee, when a mother I barely know ambushed me. She had that specific, tense energy of a woman who'd just read four different parenting...
When Your Kid Folds in Half: Surviving a Frank Breech Baby Delivery
"Put a frozen bag of frozen peas on the top of your belly," my neighbor Shelly told me at the grocery store, cornering me between the canned beans and the tortillas. "Stand on your head in the swimming pool," my...
Why Your Baby Keeps Deploying Their Tongue Like A Tiny Lizard
To: Marcus (from exactly 164 days ago) From: Marcus (current day, currently covered in mysterious sticky residue) Subject: URGENT: The tongue thing is not a hardware failure It's 2:14 AM in your timeline right now. The nursery temperature is exactly...
The newborn enchanting phase is mostly just exhaustion and bodily f...
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, or possibly a Thursday, and I was lying flat on my back on the living room rug, holding a black-and-white card depicting a heavily stylized badger. I was holding this badger approximately ten...
Troubleshooting The Real Cosmic Powers Of Your Own Human Infant
At my sister's backyard barbecue last weekend, three different people gave me completely contradictory advice about my son's biological capabilities within a ten-minute window. My uncle told me to just drop the kid in the deep end of the pool...