The Truth About Baby Ladybugs (And When Your Kid Eats One)
I was sitting on our patchy backyard lawn in my stained grey sweatpants, holding a mug of coffee that had been microwaved three times since 6 AM, when Maya ate her first bug. She was about eight months old, right...
The Wi-Fi Paranoia and Why We Chose a Simple Monitor
I was seven months pregnant with Maya, standing in the middle of Target aisle 14 in my black maternity leggings that were completely pilling at the thighs, clutching a lukewarm iced coffee like it was a life preserver. My phone...
Figuring out exactly how old is lil baby and surviving year one
It's 3:17 AM in Chicago. The radiator is hissing. I'm sitting in a glider that smells faintly of sour milk, staring at my phone. I'm so violently sleep-deprived that I've somehow fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole trying to figure...
Ice cube ice ice baby: Why the freezer trend is a terrible idea
When my son cut his first tooth, I got three contradictory texts in the span of an hour. My mother called to tell me to wrap an ice cube in a clean muslin cloth and let him gnaw on it,...
The Real Truth About Finding A Hardware Mounted Baby Gate With Door
My mother-in-law told me I didn't need one because, in her day, they just watched their kids. The neighborhood Facebook group insisted I needed a custom, four-hundred-dollar lucite barricade imported from Sweden. Then my old charge nurse from the pediatric...
The truth about rubber baby buggy bumpers and modern stroller safety
We were somewhere on Fullerton Avenue when the sidewalk just ended. It didn't taper off or gracefully transition into a crosswalk. It just turned into a crater of jagged concrete and exposed rebar, a true Chicago masterpiece. My toddler was...
Troubleshooting the hardware of your very first infant car seat
My wife's contractions were six minutes apart upstairs in room 412 of Legacy Emanuel, and I was down in the subterranean hospital parking garage violently wrestling a molded plastic base into the backseat of my Subaru. The Portland rain was...
Baby Driver Actor Dead: The Reality Check We Didn't Ask For
I was sitting in my freezing Honda CRV in the Target parking lot when the notification popped up. It was December 2024. The heater was barely working, and my toddler was finally asleep in the back after a forty-minute screaming...
Surviving The Baby Boomer Age With A Toddler In Your House
I brought my aging parents to live with us in Chicago last winter. Don't attempt to merge decades of generational trauma and a teething toddler by just smiling and pretending you've unlimited emotional bandwidth. It was a Tuesday when I...