Getting rid of oral thrush without losing your mind
It's three in the morning in Chicago. You're holding your phone flashlight in your mouth, trying to pry your screaming infant's lips apart in the dark. You see a thick white coating all over their tongue. You immediately assume the...
Surviving the Minefield of Hispanic Baby Girl Names
The greatest lie they peddle in those glossy parenting magazines—usually the ones featuring a serene mother in white linen looking lovingly at a perfectly clean infant—is that picking a name for your child is a beautiful, intuitive process. They suggest...
Troubleshooting Green Baby Poop When You're Running on Empty
It was 2:14 AM on a Tuesday when my iPhone flashlight illuminated a diaper that looked like it had been sponsored by a 1990s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure factory. Neon, radioactive, undeniably green. I froze with a baby...
Why I Stopped Talking to My Infant Like a Tiny Corporate Executive
There's this very specific, slightly yellowish stain on the left shoulder of my vintage Ramones t-shirt. I got the shirt at a thrift store in 2018, back when I had things like "free time" and "disposable income," but the stain...
What the Gisele Bundchen Baby News Taught Me About Over-40 Pregnancy
It was a Tuesday, I was wearing yoga pants with an unidentifiable yogurt stain on the left knee, standing in the aisle at Target staring blankly at diaper cream when three different people gave me completely contradicting advice about having...
The Truth About Infant Gas Drops (And What Actually Worked For Us)
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in 2017, and I was standing in my kitchen wearing a pair of maternity leggings that smelled distinctly of sour milk and sheer desperation. I was running on roughly forty-five minutes of fragmented...
The Truth About The Perfectly Put-Together Infant
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was wearing a maternity bra that hadn't been genuinely white since the Obama administration. My second kid, Maya, was exactly three weeks old and smack in the middle of a cluster-feeding...
Dr Boss is My Baby Daddy: The Real Workplace Pregnancy Guide
My mother told me to buy oversized scrubs and pretend nothing was happening until my water broke on the linoleum. My charge nurse pulled me into a supply closet and said to demand light duty the second the second line...
My First Kid's Face Looked Like a Pizza: What Causes Baby Acne
I was sitting on my living room floor surrounded by beige tulle, two ignored piles of laundry, and absolute mounting panic. I was trying to wrestle my oldest—who's now five and still my primary cautionary tale for everything—into a perfectly...