The Absurd Reality of Raising a Baby Peacock With Toddlers
I'm currently watching my two-year-old daughter attempt to post a piece of heavily chewed toast into the ventilation slat of a heated poultry brooder. Inside that plastic tub sits a bird that cost more than my first car, looking less...
The 3 AM Meltdown That Finally Taught Me How to Name a Human
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in mid-August, and the air conditioning in our apartment had completely surrendered. I was 37 weeks pregnant with Maya, wearing my husband Markβs hopelessly stained college lacrosse t-shirt, and I was crying so...
Dear Me: The Unvarnished Truth About Raising a Baby Kitten
Dear Sarah from six months ago. You're currently standing in your kitchen at 4:15 PM on a Tuesday, wearing those grey Target sweatpants with the mysterious bleach stain on the left thigh, holding a damp cardboard box. Your four-year-old, Leo,...
Dear Jess: What I Wish I Knew Before the Baby Hummingbird Incident
Dear Jess of last May, put down the plastic eye dropper and step away from the kitchen counter before you inadvertently commit a federal wildlife crime. Right now, the baby is strapped to your sweaty chest in the carrier, the...
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...
Why I Stopped Debugging My Baby's Percentile Data
The crinkly paper on the exam table was already shredded by the time Dr. Evans walked in with her tablet. Baby G, completely naked except for a very heavy diaper, was violently executing a series of bicycle kicks against my...
My 3am breakdown over finding genuinely rare monikers for daughters
It was 3:14 in the morning, the glow of my MacBook illuminating the half-eaten Hobnob resting dangerously close to my wife's massive, third-trimester bump. We were locked in a vicious, whispered argument over whether "Lyra" sounded too much like "liar"...
Surviving a baby coyote encounter with jetlagged twin toddlers
It was 4:17 in the morning in suburban California, and I was losing my mind. We had foolishly decided to drag our two-year-old twin girls on a twelve-hour flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles to visit my wife's brother, operating...
Why I Stopped Buying $45 Polyester Baby Pumpkins (And What I Do Now)
There I was, sitting on the porch steps in the humid Texas heat, trying to pry a screaming six-month-old out of a rigid polyester pumpkin suit that somehow didn't have a single snap at the crotch. My oldest daughterβwho's now...