Newborn Baby Eyesight: When Do Their Optical Sensors Boot Up?
I was holding him roughly three hours after the emergency C-section, doing that weird head-bobbing thing people do when they want a golden retriever to look at them. He just stared blankly through my left earlobe. My wife, still half-numb...
A clueless dad's guide to buying Nike baby shoes and apparel
We're at Washington Park in Portland, and the temperature is exactly 62.4 degrees. The sky has that flat, gray, overcast quality that makes for decent smartphone photos, which is great, because I've dressed my 11-month-old son like a backup dancer...
The Search Box Betrayal: Telugu Cinema and My Infant's Brain
It was 3:14 AM, the exact hour my optimism usually crashes and my brain reverts to safe mode. The baby was executing a flawless, high-decibel infinite loop of crying because of a newly erupting lateral incisor. I was bouncing him...
The Urgent Care Algorithm: Surviving Your Baby's First Stitches
DO NOT ask Siri to calculate the total blood volume of an 11-month-old while said infant is actively bleeding onto your only decent living room rug. That's my primary takeaway from last Tuesday. I was trying to run the math...
The Truth About Baby Squid: Seafood Purées and Screen Time Bugs
The biggest myth about modern parenthood is that searching for toddler topics yields cute, harmless information. You think you're looking up a simple dietary question, but the search engine decides you actually want a psychological thriller. I was standing in...
The terrified dad guide to touching that pulsing spot on their head
I was exactly three weeks into this whole fatherhood experiment when my wife, Sarah, handed me a wet washcloth during bath time and casually asked me to wash the top of his head. I froze, holding the damp fabric like...
Baby Shoes Never Worn: Why Barefoot Is Always The Smart Move
I'm currently sitting cross-legged on the floor of our hallway in Portland, staring at a plastic storage bin filled to the brim with tiny, immaculate, aggressively rigid footwear. It’s raining outside, the house is hovering at exactly 68.4 degrees because...
What Do Baby Birds Eat? A Dad's Guide to Backyard Rescues
It's 2 PM on a Tuesday, I'm supposed to be pushing code to a staging server, and instead I'm on my knees in the dirt staring at what appears to be a raw chicken tender that has somehow sprouted a...
When Babies Roll Over: The Unexpected Chaos of the Milestone
It was 2:14 AM on a Tuesday. The baby monitor on my nightstand was glowing with the kind of ominous infrared light that usually precedes a jump scare in a horror movie. I stared at the pixelated screen, trying to...