Magazine

A pile of folded secondhand baby clothes next to a wooden toy

The No-Nonsense Guide to Buying Secondhand Baby Stuff Safely

I was standing in a humid church gymnasium at 7 AM on a Saturday, seven months pregnant with my oldest son, fighting a woman in a denim jumper for a plastic bouncy seat that smelled faintly of sour milk. I...

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Pediatric nurse Priya checking the harness tension on a rear-facing baby car seat

The freezing truth about strapping infants into baby car seats

It's February in Chicago, the wind chill is somewhere around negative twelve, and I'm standing in the concrete wind tunnel of Northwestern Memorial's parking garage at two in the morning. My husband has his phone flashlight clenched between his teeth....

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A bewildered dad staring at a massive list of baby registry items

Surviving the Buy Buy Baby Registry (And Other Twin Tales)

It was a Tuesday evening, somewhere around week nineteen of the twin pregnancy, and I was staring at my iPad with the kind of mounting dread usually reserved for unexpected tax bills. My wife had just handed me the tablet,...

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Exhausted dad holding two baby sleepsuits looking hopelessly confused

The 3AM Zipper Panic and Finding the Perfect Baby Schlafanzug

It's 3:14 in the morning on a Tuesday in late November, and I'm sitting in total darkness on the floor of the nursery trying to match up what feels like forty-seven tiny metal poppers on a sleepsuit while Twin A...

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Stressed mom drinking coffee looking at a pile of baby clothes

Was ziehe ich meinem baby an? A very tired mom's clothing guide

It was 3:17 AM, and I was standing in front of the hallway thermostat wearing Dave’s stained Ohio State college hoodie, holding a screaming seven-week-old Maya. The digital display said 71 degrees. I was sweating. Maya was sweating, mostly because...

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Toddler clothes scattered across a wooden nursery floor

Dear past Priya: The unapologetic guide to kinder kleider

You're currently pinned to the nursery floor. Your toddler is starfish-spread across the rug, screaming because his green pants feel too spicy today. You're sweating through your scrub top, twenty minutes late for your shift at Rush, staring at a...

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A dad holding an 11-month-old baby dressed in layered organic winter clothes.

Debugging Baby Winter Temperature: A Dad’s Layering Logic

We were twenty-two minutes into the deployment phase of leaving the house, standing in our freezing Portland driveway, when the entire system crashed. I had just spent a quarter of an hour wrestling my 11-month-old son into a heavily insulated,...

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Toddler girl wearing organic cotton pants crawling over gravel without scraping her knees

Why I Exclusively Buy Boys Cargo Pants for My Feral Twin Girls

My mother cheerfully informed me that little girls should be dressed exclusively in floral smocked dresses, which is a lovely sentiment if your children sit perfectly still on a velvet cushion playing the harp. My extremely intense NCT group leader...

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A desperately tired dad holding two crying twin baby girls

The baby shower gifts exhausted parents actually want

We were sitting in our ground-floor flat in Zone 3, staring at a six-foot-tall synthetic velvet giraffe named Barnaby that my wife's great-aunt Susan had just proudly manhandled through our incredibly narrow hallway. Barnaby didn't do anything. He didn't hold...

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