Magazine
What to wear to a baby shower when nothing fits (a survival guide)
Sarah was wedged inside a floral maternity dress that had, seemingly overnight, transformed from breezy summer elegance into a highly restrictive sausage casing. It was mid-July, she was thirty-two weeks pregnant with the twins, and our own baby shower was...
Acoustics of the Womb and My Metal Baking Sheet Drop Disaster
The noise sounded like a Ford Taurus crashing into a cymbal factory. It was just me dropping six aluminum baking sheets onto the kitchen tile, but in our quiet Portland apartment, the acoustic shockwave was violently loud. Our dog scrambled...
The Unfiltered Truth About When Your Newborn Can Actually See You
I spent three months of my pregnancy painting a perfectly muted sage green mural on my son's nursery wall. I curated taupe crib sheets. I bought dusty rose swaddles. I spent an embarrassing amount of money making sure his room...
The brutal, messy truth about when your baby will finally sit up
I was sitting cross-legged on my living room rug, trapped in a fortress of couch cushions. My son, six months old and entirely unbothered by gravity, had just executed his fortieth faceplant of the morning. His grandmother was on FaceTime,...
When Can You Find Out Gender Of Baby? A Twin Dad's Honest Guide
I was standing in our galley kitchen on a miserable Tuesday afternoon, holding a plastic cup of my wife’s morning urine in one hand and a slightly expired box of baking soda in the other. The internet—that infinite void of...
The Great Melanin Firmware Update: A Dad's Guide to Eye Color
Hey Marcus from six months ago. You're currently standing by the window in our perpetually gray Portland living room, angling a five-month-old infant toward the meager sunlight, trying to determine if her irises are hex code #4B5320 (Army Green) or...
The 3 AM Teething Triage: Surviving the First Tooth
It was three in the morning, mid-January in Chicago, and the wind was howling off Lake Michigan. My toddler was thrashing in her crib like she was possessed, her sleep sack completely saturated with drool. I stood there running through...
The Middle-of-the-Night Panic Search For Your Baby's First Tooth
I was staring at the ceiling of our Chicago apartment at 3:14 AM. The radiator was clanking. My son was gnawing on my collarbone like a starving hyena. His chin was a waterfall of drool, soaking right through my third...
When Do Babies Start Babbling? A Tired Mom’s Guide to the Noise
There I was, sitting cross-legged on my living room rug surrounded by a mountain of unsorted laundry, aggressively waving black-and-white flashcards in my firstborn’s face. Leo was about four months old at the time, staring at me with the blankest...