Surviving the Free Baby Box Hustle: A Dad's Tracker
It was 7:42 PM on a Tuesday, raining sideways in typical Portland fashion, and I was standing on my porch staring at a pile of soggy cardboard that made my house look like a localized fulfillment center. My neighbor gave...
Freestyle Lil Baby & Car Rides: Bass, Babies, and Eardrums
My mother-in-law Sheila leaned right into the bassinet and told me, in absolute dead earnestness, that playing Mozart at a low volume was the only mathematically proven way to build brain cells in an infant. My 22-year-old cousin, who by...
Dear Past Me: Surviving Baby Colds With A Frida Baby Nose Sucker
Dear Past Me from six months ago, You're currently standing in aisle 14 at Target, holding a registry scanner gun for your pregnant sister, and staring blindly at a wall of infant grooming tools. You're wearing your stained gray "mom"...
Get Set Baby: Why Over-the-Top Newborn Prep Meets 3 AM Reality
We were standing in the narrow hallway of our second-floor London flat, holding two incredibly heavy car seats containing two very small, very loud humans. It was raining, obviously. The boot of the Uber had just been emptied of a...
The brutal before and after of your get-set baby preparation
I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, standing in the middle of our cramped Chicago second bedroom holding a perfectly folded stack of organic burp cloths. I had color-coordinated the drawer dividers. I actually ironed the crib sheets. I thought I had...
Transporting a Three-Tier Boho Frosting Tower on I-5 at 15 MPH
The suspension on a 2016 Subaru Outback is surprisingly unforgiving when you've forty pounds of Swiss meringue buttercream buckled into the passenger seat. I was driving fifteen miles per hour down the shoulder of I-5 with my hazard lights flashing,...
That cute baby raindeer show is actually a parental nightmare
I was standing by the kitchen island at 6:45 AM on a Tuesday, wearing gray sweatpants that honestly probably smelled like stale yogurt, scraping hardened oatmeal off a plastic bowl with my thumbnail, when Leo casually walked in holding his...
Decoding Baby Quilt Dimensions When You Can't Put Them in a Crib
I'm sitting on the hardwood floor of our Portland apartment with a Stanley tape measure, surrounded by six different square-ish blankets, trying to categorize them by surface area. It's exactly three weeks after the baby shower. My wife, Maya, is...
Baby Please Come Home: Surviving The First 48 Hours
Whatever you do, don't boldly tell the discharge nurse that you already configured the car seat hardware when your only actual training was skimming a YouTube Short on 1.5x speed. I learned this the hard way while sweating profusely in...