The Terrifying Truth About Accutane Babies And My Pregnancy
It was 2018, I was 28 weeks pregnant with Maya, and I was sitting completely frozen on my bathroom floor. I was wearing Mark's ancient, oversized college t-shirtβthe grey one with a completely unidentifiable stain near the collar that I...
Surviving the 9-Month Sleep Regression and Absolute Chaos
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was standing in the dark wearing a pair of maternity leggings I should have burned six months ago and my husband Dave's faded college hoodie, staring at Maya. She was gripping...
Why I Threw Away the Pink Plastic (And Found Better Baby Girl Toys)
It was 2:14 AM on December 26th, and I was sitting on the floor in a nursing bra that had completely given up the ghost sometime in 2016 and a pair of Dave's boxer briefs, furiously crying over a plastic...
What Actually Happened When I Tried A Baby Guinness For My Milk
The breast pump was making that rhythmic, wheezing, dying-goose sound on my kitchen counter at three in the morning, and I was staring at exactly one-and-a-half ounces of milk in the little plastic bottle. My oldest son, Hunterβwho is the...
Surprise, You Now Have a Dozen Hamsters (Surviving the Litter)
"Momma, Princess Fluffbutt split into tiny pink jellybeans!" That was how my four-year-old announced we were suddenly harboring fugitives on a Tuesday morning while I was elbow-deep in packing tape for my Etsy shop and trying to keep the baby...
Why we really need to talk about the ugly side of baby headbands
You pull it out of the tissue paper at your baby shower. It's a stiff nylon elastic band attached to a sequined peony the size of a small cabbage. The aunties in the room coo over it, telling you how...
When My Back Gave Out: The Ugly Truth About a Baby Hip Carrier
We were twenty minutes into the Parker County Peach Festival when I felt something in my lower spine actually shift. It was 98 degrees in the shade, the air felt like a wet wool blanket, and my sixteen-month-old son, Beau,...
When You Become the Default Human Holder for Your Baby
It was four in the morning in mid-February, the kind of Chicago winter night where the radiators hiss aggressively and the air feels like dry ice. Maya was six weeks old and deep in the trenches of her peak colic...
Surviving the Fourth Trimester: When Your Newborn Owns You
I was wearing a nursing bra that smelled aggressively of sour milk and my husband Daveβs old college sweatpants with a mysterious crusty patch on the knee, standing in the kitchen at 3:17 AM swaying like a seasick sailor. Maya...