Baby Blanket Size: A Messy, Exhausted Guide to Getting It Right
I was standing in my kitchen wearing my absolutely tragic gray maternity joggers, holding my third cup of violently lukewarm coffee, when I realized I was drowning in conflicting advice. I was pregnant with Leo, my first, and three different...
A letter to myself about the perfect onesie set
Listen. You're currently standing over the bassinet at 3:14 AM watching a mustard-yellow stain slowly bloom across the back of your daughter's supposedly leak-proof pajamas. You're exhausted. You're calculating how many hours of sleep you can get before your shift...
Escaping Sausage Casings: short sleeve pajamas toddler edition
It's 7:14 PM on a damp Tuesday, and I'm currently employing a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu move I saw on YouTube just to get my two-year-old's arm into a pajama top. Elsie is howling indignantly; her twin sister Maya is standing on...
Thermal Throttling: Why We Finally Switched to a Bamboo Baby Blanket
It was 2:14 AM during that ridiculous heat dome we had in Portland last July, and the Nanit camera monitor was basically glowing red. The nursery temperature was hovering at 78 degrees despite the window AC unit aggressively coughing in...
Troubleshooting the Breathable Blanket for Newborns Paradox
I was standing in our Portland apartment's second bedroom—newly converted from my gaming office to a nursery—staring at a stack of fourteen folded textiles. Fourteen. My wife, Sarah, had washed, dried, and color-coordinated a mountain of fabric based on a...
Why My Perfect Pink Infant Bedding Set Ended Up In The Trash
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, sitting on the floor of my Chicago apartment, crying over a contractor bag. Inside the plastic bag was roughly four hundred dollars worth of perfectly coordinated blush textiles. It was a complete crib set I...
The 3 AM Disaster That Taught Me Everything About Baby Loveys
Tuesday, 6:42 PM. The Central Line. Specifically, the perilous two-inch gap between the train carriage and the platform at St. Paul's station. That's exactly where it went. Maya's beloved, slightly grey-tinged, biologically questionable scrap of fabric slipped from her sticky...
What the hospital ruined about my cozy baby blanket fantasies
I'm currently staring at a hand-knit, cable-stitch monstrosity that my great-aunt sent from Delhi. It weighs about as much as a small dog. Before nursing school, before I had a child of my own who treats sleep like a hostile...
The brutal truth about buying an infant knit romper for your kid
My mother called from San Jose on a Tuesday to warn me that wool would give my baby a rash that would scar him for life. The very next morning, my sister-in-law swore that unless I put him in thick...