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...
Dear Past Tom: Surviving When Your Baby's Coming Back Up
Dear Past Tom of six months ago, You're currently sitting in The Crown on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, enjoying a rare hour of unsupervised freedom while your mother-in-law watches the twins. You have consumed exactly one and a half pints...
Surviving the High-Stakes Math of Your Baby's Bath Temp
I'm currently bent double over a plastic tub that looks suspiciously like an oversized Tupperware container, plunging my left elbow into lukewarm water while Twin A tries to ingest a highly questionable bath sponge. It's precisely 6:14 PM, a time...
What To Do When The Baby Zombie Phase Actually Ruins Your Sleep
Listen. It was a quarter past three on a Tuesday when I realized my apartment was under a coordinated siege by two entirely different types of the undead. My husband and my older kid were huddled over an iPad in...
The clinical truth about stealing that baby yoda name for your kid
I'm staring at a hospital bassinet card at three in the morning in the pediatric ward, reading the name Anakin and quietly judging the parents from the hallway. That was me five years ago. Crisp scrubs, zero kids, and heavily...
The Impossible Task of Finding a Baby Winter Hat That Stays On
We're in the parking lot of the Skokie Target. It's twelve degrees outside, which in Chicago math with the wind chill feels like negative four hundred. Leo is maybe six months old. I'm shivering in yoga pants with a hardened...
The Truth About Baby White Noise (And My Jet Engine Mistake)
I was standing in the middle of my oldest son's nursery at two in the morning, holding my phone out in front of me like a paranormal investigator trying to catch a ghost, while a free sound-measuring app I had...
New Baby What You Wishing For? The Brutal Truth About The First Year
I'm standing in my tiny, unventilated bathroom at 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in November, wearing a pair of mesh hospital underwear that I've somehow managed to launder and reuse because I refuse to let them go, holding my firstborn,...