Magazine
Dear Past Tom: Surviving When Your Baby's Coming Back Up
Dear Past Tom of six months ago, You're currently sitting in The Crown on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, enjoying a rare hour of unsupervised freedom while your mother-in-law watches the twins. You have consumed exactly one and a half pints...
Surviving the High-Stakes Math of Your Baby's Bath Temp
I'm currently bent double over a plastic tub that looks suspiciously like an oversized Tupperware container, plunging my left elbow into lukewarm water while Twin A tries to ingest a highly questionable bath sponge. It's precisely 6:14 PM, a time...
What To Do When The Baby Zombie Phase Actually Ruins Your Sleep
Listen. It was a quarter past three on a Tuesday when I realized my apartment was under a coordinated siege by two entirely different types of the undead. My husband and my older kid were huddled over an iPad in...
The Humiliating Reality of Trying Baby Yoga With Twins
I'm currently lying on a foam mat that smells faintly of damp digestive biscuits and municipal floor cleaner in a drafty church hall in Hackney. The instructor, a woman named Serenity who's wearing linen trousers that look entirely too comfortable...
The clinical truth about stealing that baby yoda name for your kid
I'm staring at a hospital bassinet card at three in the morning in the pediatric ward, reading the name Anakin and quietly judging the parents from the hallway. That was me five years ago. Crisp scrubs, zero kids, and heavily...
When that angry red nappy rash is actually a fungal invasion
I was standing over the changing mat at three in the morning with Twin A, heavily sleep-deprived and holding a spatula covered in Sudocrem, when I realised the biggest lie in modern parenting is that every red bottom just needs...
When your baby won't stop crying and the manuals are useless
It's 4:13 AM, and I'm bouncing on a grey exercise ball in the middle of my living room, clutching Florence, who's currently emitting a sound I can only describe as a fire engine trapped inside a very angry cat. Matilda,...
What I wish I knew about raising our baby with Down syndrome
Hey man. It’s Marcus. Or rather, it’s you, exactly six months in the future. I know exactly what you’re doing right now. You’re sitting in the blue glow of the humidifier at 3:17 AM, holding your phone six inches from...
The Impossible Task of Finding a Baby Winter Hat That Stays On
We're in the parking lot of the Skokie Target. It's twelve degrees outside, which in Chicago math with the wind chill feels like negative four hundred. Leo is maybe six months old. I'm shivering in yoga pants with a hardened...