The waiting game of motherhood: exactly when do babies smile
I was hanging over the bassinet at three in the morning making a sound I can only describe as a dying seal. Day forty-two of my maternity leave. I smelled like sour milk and desperation. I had spent the last...
The reality of raising a newborn and a kitten at the same time
There we were at three in the morning. My newborn daughter was asleep in her bassinet, her mouth hanging open like a tiny, toothless baby catfish. I was half-asleep in the glider, holding a cold cup of tea. Then a...
Forget The 2001 Myths: Keeping Your Baby Boy Alive And Thriving
I'm sitting on the nursery floor at three in the morning, holding my screaming infant, and staring at a hand-me-down parenting paperback my aunt insisted I read. It's a guide to raising boys, published right around the turn of the...
Why Hard Baby Shoes Are a Trap (And What to Use Instead)
There was a moderate amount of blood on my living room rug. It was February in Chicago, the kind of cold that seeps up through the floorboards and makes your bones ache. My son was ten months old and wearing...
The Late Night Truth About Your Grunting Newborn (And Why I Panicked)
It was exactly 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in mid-November, and I was wearing my husbandβs gray college sweatpantsβthe ones with the permanent, unidentifiable spit-up stain on the left knee that I absolutely refused to wash because doing laundry felt...
Chasing the Average Baby Weight: A Twin Dad's Red Book Survival
There's a very specific, quiet humiliation reserved for parents standing in a drafty NHS community clinic in late November, frantically trying to undress a furious infant while a health visitor named Brenda hovers with a clipboard. You have to take...
Debugging The Wardrobe: The Envelope Fold Revelation
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday when the system crashed. The baby monitor on my nightstand emitted a sound that was less of a cry and more of a wet, ominous sputtering noise. I stumbled into the nursery, bleary-eyed...
Raising Baby Kittens With Kids: The Blunt Unfiltered Truth
I'm standing in my kitchen at 3:14 in the morning, wearing yesterday's yoga pants with a questionable crusty stain on the knee, holding a bottle smaller than my own thumb. My oldest kid, who swore up and down on his...
Why Your Strampler Baby Needs Far Less Clothes Than You Think
I remember distinctly sitting on my living room rug about four years ago, trying to wrestle my oldest sonβs chubby little newborn thigh into a pair of raw denim baby jeans. He was screaming like I was torturing him, my...