Magazine

Ultrasound scan showing early pregnancy development with a natural wooden teething toy resting nearby on a blanket

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...

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Toddler reading a book about mice in a safe indoor playroom

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...

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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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A tired father inspecting a baby cot mattress with a flashlight.

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...

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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 that’s what her uncle did in...

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A very tired dad staring blankly at a wall of infant milk cans in a grocery store aisle.

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...

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A dad nervously holding a baby spoon with thinned peanut butter next to a high chair

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...

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