Raising an Antiracist Child: Why Colorblind Parenting Fails
It was a Tuesday in 2019. I was standing in aisle four of our local Target, wearing a pair of violently pilled gray yoga pants with a mystery stain on the knee, clutching a lukewarm iced coffee like it was...
Why Your Innocent TV Search Could Show Your Toddler an R-Rated Movie
It was 3:17 AM on a Tuesday, and I was quite literally running on a half-eaten sleeve of stale saltines and the sheer desperate hope that my eight-month-old would just close her eyes. She had been screaming since midnight, teething...
The Terrifying Truth About Accutane Babies And My Pregnancy
It was 2018, I was 28 weeks pregnant with Maya, and I was sitting completely frozen on my bathroom floor. I was wearing Mark's ancient, oversized college t-shirt—the grey one with a completely unidentifiable stain near the collar that I...
Why I threw our smart baby heart monitor in the trash
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, raining sideways against our Portland windows, when the klaxon sounded. It wasn't a gentle beep. It was the specific, terrifying frequency of a submarine dive alarm broadcasting directly from my nightstand. My wife...
The Night I Searched Baby Kxtten and Broke My Tech Dad Brain
The thermostat was locked at exactly 69.5 degrees, the ambient white noise machine was humming at a steady 45 decibels, and the 11-month-old had finally ceased her evening operational errors. I was sitting on the living room rug, eating cold...
The Complete Nightmare of Choosing a Baby Girl Name
I was thirty-four hours post-C-section, wearing those horrific mesh hospital underwear and a nursing bra that smelled entirely like sour milk and desperation, just staring at this blank government form. The birth certificate lady was hovering by the door holding...
Why We Blasted Baby Pluto To Survive The Fourth Trimester
It’s 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in November. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my husband Dave’s Honda Civic, parked securely in our own driveway with the engine idling. I’m wearing a gray fleece bathrobe that smells aggressively like...
My Disastrous Attempt at Raising a Pokémon Fan (And What Worked)
It was a Tuesday in 2019, I was running on maybe three hours of broken sleep, wearing a pair of Target leggings that smelled vaguely of sour milk, and I decided this was the perfect moment to introduce my then-two-year-old...
Raising A Baby Goth Without Losing Your Mind Or Your Aesthetic
The grand, sweeping myth of alternative parenting is that we're all gliding around dimly lit Victorian manors, raising miniature vampires who only listen to Bauhaus and politely refuse to play with brightly coloured plastic. The depressing reality is that I'm...