Sweating bullets over baby wool in a Portland heatwave
It was mid-July, the Nanit camera was flashing a menacing red 81 degrees, and our 1924 Portland craftsman was doing its best impression of a pizza oven. I was frantically trying to program a portable AC unit with one hand...
The great fluffy lie (and why I started googling babywolle kaufen)
The parcel arrived on a wet Tuesday, smelling faintly of lavender and aggressively good intentions. Great Aunt Muriel had knitted the twins matching cardigans. I pulled the first one out of the tissue paper and immediately realised we had a...
Why Japanese Newborn Clothes Actually Save Your Sanity With A Baby
Let me tell you the biggest lie the baby industry ever sold us: that newborns need to wear actual outfits. I'm talking about miniature denim overalls, stiff corduroy suspender sets, and tiny button-down flannels. With my oldest, bless his heart,...
The 3 AM Onesie Panic and the Magic of Japanese Baby Clothes
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday and I was wearing a pair of maternity leggings that had a crusty smear of Greek yogurt on the left thigh, staring down at my firstborn, Leo, who was screaming like I was...
Why The Infant Kimono Top Saved My Sanity With Newborn Twins
Don't, under any circumstances, attempt to pull a high-street cotton bodysuit over the head of a three-day-old infant in the dark. I learned this on our second night home from the hospital, operating on a grand total of forty-two minutes...
The completely unhinged truth about buying a newborn knit onesie
I was exactly 37 weeks pregnant with Maya, sweating through a maternity tank top that had a permanent grease stain from a rogue french fry I dropped during my second trimester, when the great clothing wars officially began. We were...
Cardigan Infant Wardrobe: Why I Burned All My Pullovers
It was 2:14 PM on a Tuesday, and I was sweating through my only clean pair of maternity leggings in the parking lot of a Target. Leo was exactly three weeks old, screaming like I was actively injuring him, and...
Dear Past Me: The Brutal Truth About Wrapping Babies in Cotton
Dear Tom of twenty-four months ago, It's currently Tuesday evening, and you're standing in the nursery of our flat in Zone 3, staring at a stack of twenty-four identical white squares of fabric your mother-in-law just dropped off. You're holding...
Wie groΓ ist eine babydecke? My British Dad Blanket Survival
The rain in the Tesco car park was coming down in that aggressively horizontal British way, and I was losing a wrestling match with a piece of fabric. Twin A (the escape artist) was arching her back in the pram,...