The Bizarre Lifecycle of Infant Hair (And Why We Don't Shave It)
My mother-in-law was dead serious when she handed me my beard trimmer. We were sitting in the living room, staring at the side of my 11-month-old's head, which currently looked like a poorly maintained lawn. He had thick patches on...
The Baby Grand Era: When Grandma’s Advice Makes You Want to Scream
I'm staring at a drop-side crib that looks like it survived the Oregon Trail, and my mother-in-law is patting the literal patchwork quilt she just laid inside it. She's telling me how my husband slept in this exact death trap...
Before and After: Debugging the Weird Hardware of a Baby Foot
Last Tuesday at 3 AM, I found myself holding my son's left ankle like I was inspecting a suspicious external hard drive, trying to figure out how his toes were suddenly jammed completely sideways inside his pajamas. The nursery monitor...
The real truth about baby food pouches and picky eating
My mother-in-law told me I need to boil and blend organic root vegetables until my kitchen looks like a nineteenth-century apothecary. The guy ahead of me at our Portland neighborhood coffee shop loudly proclaimed that purees destroy a baby's jaw...
Debugging the Holiday Magic: Our First Baby Elf Setup
"Put it on the mantle so he knows Santa is watching," my mother told me on Thanksgiving, handing me a felt doll with suspicious eyes and unnaturally long limbs. "Don't bring that surveillance state psychological warfare into your home," my...
Dear Past Tom: The Baby Dragon Evo Is Not A Wooden Toy
Dear Tom of six months ago. You're currently sitting on the kitchen floor at 6:13 AM, watching Maya meticulously paint the skirting boards with organic oat porridge while Lily tries to negotiate with a rogue Cheerio she found under the...
The Exhausted Parent's Guide to Choosing a Great Baby Doctor
I'm currently typing this one-handed on my phone in a clinic waiting room that smells aggressively like rubbing alcohol and cheap cherry lollipops, while my youngest tries to aggressively gnaw my collarbone off. The lady across from me is staring...
What the bhad baby news taught me about newborn survival mode
The blue light from my phone was set to the absolute lowest brightness, but in the pitch black of our Portland bedroom at 3:17 AM, it still felt like staring directly into a laser pointer. My eleven-month-old daughter was asleep...
The Myth of the Book Baby and Why My Twins Refused to Read It
At twenty past three on a damp Tuesday morning in our entirely too small London flat, I found myself holding a screaming infant in one arm while desperately trying to flip the pages of a sleep-training manual with my teeth....