Magazine

Tired father looking suspiciously at a padded baby nest on the living room floor.

The Great Padded Donut Deception: A Father's Baby Nest Confession

I was standing in the middle of our cramped London flat at 3:17 a.m., holding what looked like an oversized, over-engineered dog bed, desperately trying to remember which twin I had just fed. Maya was wailing from the Moses basket,...

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A messy toddler eating shredded pork from a suction plate at a family barbecue

Surviving the Chaos of Smoking Baby Back Ribs With Toddlers

It was 4:13 PM on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and I was wearing my absolute favorite, completely impractical white linen top from Zara. I don't know why I wore white. It was an act of extreme hubris. My husband,...

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A baby girl in a smocked dress looking suspiciously at a bowl of carrots

A Letter to Myself About the Absurdity of Smocked Baby Clothes

Dear Tom of six months ago. I know exactly where you're right now. You're standing in the upstairs bathroom at your mother-in-law's house, holding Maya at arm's length over the porcelain sink. You're staring at a £75 hand-smocked, pale blue...

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Exhausted parents looking at a complicated written birth plan on a table.

Megan Walerius, Birth Plans, and the Chaos of Expectations

When we announced the twins were on the way, I received three distinct pieces of advice within a forty-five-minute window at my local pub. My mother, clutching a small glass of sherry, told us to simply let nature take its...

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Jess folding organic cotton Linxia baby clothes on a messy living room couch

Raising A Linxia Baby: The Unfiltered Truth About Newborn Life

I was standing in the Target baby aisle at 9 PM on a Tuesday, completely dead inside, while my oldest son Jackson screamed against my chest in a carrier that I was probably wearing wrong. He was three weeks old....

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A pile of white cloth diaper inserts next to a bathtub

The ugly truth about deep cleaning your reusable cloth diapers

I was standing over the changing table last November, the Chicago wind rattling the windowpanes, pulling a supposedly fresh cloth diaper off my toddler. It smelled exactly like the gerbil enclosure at a rundown pet store. I had washed that...

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A tired dad staring confused at an ultrasound printout on his desk

When Can You Tell the Gender of a Baby? A Dad's Data Timeline

I was sitting in my ergonomic office chair, hitting CMD+R on my Gmail inbox every forty seconds like I was waiting for a server deployment to finish. We were at week ten of the pregnancy. Somewhere in the cloud, a...

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A translucent baby scorpion next to an infant crib leg.

Debugging the Desert: Surviving a Baby Scorpion in the Nursery

It was 2:14 AM in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was scanning the baseboards of our Airbnb with a blacklight flashlight I had overnighted from Amazon, looking for what I can only describe as a hardware glitch in nature. My 11-month-old...

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A frustrated mom holding a toddler in a stiff holiday suit.

The disaster of picking a baby boy easter outfit

It was ten in the morning on a Sunday and I was staring at a mustard-yellow blowout that had completely breached the hull of a forty-dollar miniature linen suit. My mother-in-law was knocking on the powder room door, asking if...

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