Magazine

A tiny baby hummingbird resting safely on a green leaf outdoors

Dear Jess: What I Wish I Knew Before the Baby Hummingbird Incident

Dear Jess of last May, put down the plastic eye dropper and step away from the kitchen counter before you inadvertently commit a federal wildlife crime. Right now, the baby is strapped to your sweaty chest in the carrier, the...

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A tired dad holding a hiccuping baby against his shoulder

My Infant Is Glitching: The Truth About Those Endless Hiccups

It's 3:14 AM, and I'm staring at my phone's stopwatch, logging the exact intervals between my son's chest spasms. Every 4.2 seconds, his entire eleven-pound body jerks like a poorly coded physics engine that can't figure out gravity. He doesn't...

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Baby wearing a corrective cranial helmet sleeping peacefully in a crib

The Honest Truth About Flat Spots and That Expensive Baby Helmet

I was sitting in the pediatrician's office with my oldestβ€”who's now five and completely fine, but was then a three-month-old potato with a head shaped vaguely like a deflated footballβ€”convinced I had ruined his brain forever. I’d gone down a...

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A tired dad staring blankly at a baby brush while holding a wriggling toddler

The Absurd Reality of Managing Your Infant's Changing Hairline

I'm standing over the bathtub at 6:45 PM with a plastic comb in one hand and a remarkably slippery, screeching two-year-old in the other, desperately trying to yank a knot out of her wet fringe. This, for the record, is...

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Stressed dad looking at a laptop while holding a squirmy baby

Why I Stopped Debugging My Baby's Percentile Data

The crinkly paper on the exam table was already shredded by the time Dr. Evans walked in with her tablet. Baby G, completely naked except for a very heavy diaper, was violently executing a series of bicycle kicks against my...

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A tired father wearing his baby in a carrier while working on a laptop at a kitchen island.

Debugging Fatherhood: What Silverbacks Taught Me About Babies

I was standing in our Portland kitchen at 3 AM, wearing a stained t-shirt and intensely color-coding my son's diaper output in a spreadsheet, when I realized my troubleshooting manual for fatherhood was completely corrupted. The lactation consultant at the...

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Exhausted dad looking at a fluffy puppy stealing a dummy on the living room floor

The Great Baby Golden Retriever Myth And How My Family Survived

There's a specific sort of betrayal you feel when you're prying a soggy, half-chewed muslin cloth out of the jaws of a twelve-week-old retriever while simultaneously trying to stop a toddler from attempting to ride said animal like a Shetland...

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Toddler standing on a coffee table knocking over a tall tower of blocks

When Your Toddler Turns Into a Baby Godzilla Destroying Your House

Yesterday at exactly 4:15 PM, I found myself hiding in the pantry eating stale Goldfish crackers in the dark while my two-year-old stood victorious on the coffee table, roaring at the top of his lungs after methodically sweeping my last...

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Exhausted British dad looking at a laptop spreadsheet of rare daughter monikers while holding two bottles.

My 3am breakdown over finding genuinely rare monikers for daughters

It was 3:14 in the morning, the glow of my MacBook illuminating the half-eaten Hobnob resting dangerously close to my wife's massive, third-trimester bump. We were locked in a vicious, whispered argument over whether "Lyra" sounded too much like "liar"...

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