System Reboot: Surviving Year One With An HIE Diagnosis
The digital display above the plastic incubator read 33.5 degrees Celsius. I stood there in a yellow isolation gown that was slightly too short for my arms, staring at a screen that looked exactly like a 1990s MS-DOS prompt. I...
That Polo G Lyric Sent Me Down a Terrifying Parenting Rabbit Hole
I was elbow-deep in a tub of Sudocrem, trying to wrestle two screaming two-year-old girls into their nighttime nappies, when a playlist I hadn’t updated since 2019 shuffled onto a track by Polo G. I wasn't really listening—I was mostly...
The Reality of the Have A Baby With Me Daniel Caesar Lyrics
I was on my hands and knees in our South London flat, using a blunt butter knife to chisel hardened Weetabix off the skirting board, when Spotify’s algorithm decided to serve up a heavy dose of R&B. The song sounded...
How To Say Hasta La Vista Baby Without Losing Your Mind
My right shoe was on. My left shoe was somewhere under the hallway console table. My ten-month-old had a death grip on my sweatpants, wailing like I was walking into a fire instead of just getting a routine dental cleaning....
The 3AM Panic: Why Your Baby's Dark Green Poop Is Usually Fine
It's 3:14 in the morning, and I'm operating entirely by the pale, depressing glow of my phone's flashlight. The four-minute-older twin has decided that sleeping through the night is a scam invented by adults, and she's communicating this via a...
Dear Past Priya: The Goldie Baby Method For Maternal Burnout
Dear Priya from exactly six months ago. You're currently sitting on the bath mat in our freezing Chicago apartment, staring at the crooked grout lines while your son screams on the other side of the door. The e baby monitor...
What to do when your toddler finds a bird in the garden
It was a Tuesday afternoon, roughly forty-five minutes before I usually cave and put the television on, when Florence trotted up to me holding what appeared to be a very angry, moldy tennis ball. She deposited it directly onto my...
Dear Tom: A guide to surviving the very weird baby alien phase
Dear Tom, You're currently sitting on the edge of a spectacularly uncomfortable plastic mattress in the maternity ward at St Thomas' Hospital, staring into a perspex box containing two squirming, purple, vernix-covered creatures. They look less like the cherubic infants...
How Always Be My Baby Lyrics Fixed My Kid's 2 AM Sleep Bug
It's 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, the Portland rain is actively trying to break my windowpanes, and I'm standing in the exact center of the nursery desperately trying to remember the bridge to a 1996 Mariah Carey pop anthem. My...