That viral stone baby video is lying to you about pregnancy
It's two in the morning and I'm watching my toddler practice his mixed martial arts kicks in his sleep while my phone screen illuminates the dark. The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that what a tired mother really...
What to Do When Your Toddler Finds a Wild Baby Mouse in the Yard
My Tuesday morning began with a half-dead rodent. I was standing in our Chicago backyard, clutching a lukewarm coffee, while my two-year-old proudly held out her hands to show me her new treasure. Our family cat was sitting a few...
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...
The Honest Truth About Flat Spots and That Expensive Baby Helmet
I was sitting in the pediatrician's office with my oldestβwho's now five and completely fine, but was then a three-month-old potato with a head shaped vaguely like a deflated footballβconvinced I had ruined his brain forever. Iβd gone down a...
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...
What Finding Baby Bed Bugs at 3 AM Actually Does to a Parent
The glow of my phone screen at 3:14 AM illuminated what I can only describe as a tiny, malevolent sesame seed crawling across Maya's fitted sheet. I had only come into the nursery because she had done that specific, high-pitched...
Why the happy baby pose saved my structurally ruined spine
When my lower back finally gave out, I received three distinct pieces of advice from three very different people. My mother-in-law told me I needed to sleep on a plank of pine wood because thatβs what her uncle did in...
The Great Formula Panics: What I Learned About Feeding My Kid
It was 4:12 AM, I was holding a screaming, thrashing newborn, and my laptop screen was glowing in the dark with a massive spreadsheet titled Formula_Matrix_v4_FINAL.xlsx. My wife walked into the kitchen, looked at the screen, looked at my bloodshot...
The peanut butter baby protocol: Debugging a first allergen
Flashback to a misty Portland Tuesday about six months ago. My wife Sarah was in the other room on a muted Zoom call, and I was standing in the kitchen staring at a nine-dollar jar of organic, single-ingredient peanut butter...