Magazine
My Beanie Baby Website Search: A Dad's Guide to Winter Hats & Toys
I'm sitting in the artificial blue glow of my MacBook at 3:14 AM, desperately clicking through a retro-looking beanie baby website that looks like it hasn't seen a CSS update since Netscape Navigator was a thing. My 11-month-old son is...
The Hard Truth About Beanie Babies Worth: A Letter to Past Me
Dear Jess of six months ago. Right now, you're standing in the gravel driveway in your pajama pants, squinting in the Texas sun, watching your mom's Honda CR-V idle while she wrestles three massive, dust-caked Rubbermaid tubs out of the...
The Strange Logic of Beanie Babies Birthdays & Safe Sleep
It was exactly 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was standing in the pale, unforgiving light of the open refrigerator, holding a slightly dusty, bright pink plush platypus inside a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. My 11-month-old was finally asleep after...
The absurdly high stakes of keeping your bassinet baby alive
Before we even brought the twins home from the hospital, three different people gave me three mutually exclusive pieces of advice about where they should sleep. My mother-in-law insisted I needed to line their little bedside cribs with rolled-up cashmere...
The Great Midnight Laundry Crash: Blankets and Baby Thermodynamics
I'm standing in our dimly lit basement laundry room at 2:14 AM, holding what used to be a piece of luxury textile, and it currently looks like a severely depressed, matted muppet. My wife is standing in the doorway, her...
Surviving 29 Weeks: From Butternut Squashes to Tiny Terrorists
I'm currently watching a piece of steamed sweet potato make its third, highly ambitious trajectory across my kitchen, propelled by the shockingly strong left arm of a child who, until very recently, was basically a sentient bag of flour. If...
The Completely Unfiltered Guide to Buying Baby's Room Furniture
When I was pregnant with my first, my mother-in-law showed up at my house hauling an antique, drop-side wooden cradle that had been sitting in a humid East Texas attic since 1984. It smelled like mothballs and questionable structural integrity....
Decoding the chaos of a baby's pacifier without losing your mind
My mother-in-law cornered me by the diaper pail on day three of my son's life, waving a neon green chunk of silicone and declaring that if I didn't plug him up right now, he'd be a thumb-sucker until college. Twelve...
Baby's On Fire By Die Antwoord: A Minivan Parenting Disaster
There I was, merging onto Highway 290 with a trunk full of melting H-E-B groceries and a two-year-old who had finally surrendered to sleep in his car seat, when the Bluetooth decided to get cute. I was listening to my...