What Pete Davidson Actually Got Right About Newborns

Dear Sarah from six months ago,

You're currently sitting in the Target parking lot in your embarrassingly stained yoga pants, drinking a lukewarm latte and having a full-blown panic attack. Your best friend just texted that she's officially going into labor, and you suddenly realized that even though you already have two kids—Maya is seven, Leo is four—you've forgotten literally everything about keeping a newborn alive. You're frantically scrolling through your phone to distract yourself, which is exactly how you ended up falling down an internet rabbit hole about the Pete Davidson baby news. Yes, the comedian guy. He and his girlfriend had a daughter, and honestly? Reading about his complete, chaotic descent into fatherhood actually brought all my own newborn trauma flooding back.

Because he was on some late-night show just sounding completely unhinged and sleep-deprived, and I realized he's actually experiencing the exact same bizarre, terrifying milestones we all do. I started writing this down in the car because I needed you—well, me, but past me—to remember what it's really like before you go over to your best friend's house and start spouting useless, sanitized advice.

The phantom poop situation

Okay, so Pete was on TV ranting about how newborns will literally trick you during a diaper change. He called it the "psych" poop. He said they crap, and then you wipe them, and you get the ointment ready, and they look at you and go "psych!" and just crap again. I screamed when I heard this because I had completely blocked out this specific form of psychological torture.

Do you remember Leo's first month? The absolute betrayal of the second-wave poop. You hear the grunting. You wait. You think the coast is clear, so you open the diaper, and it's just a mustard-colored disaster zone. You go through half a pack of wipes trying to clean out all the little leg rolls, holding their tiny ankles up in the air like a weird rotisserie chicken. And the second—the EXACT SECOND—the cold air hits their bare butt, their body just violently expels another wave. It's a trap. My doctor, Dr. Lin, mumbled something once about how their tiny digestive systems are basically just reflex tubes and the temperature change triggers a spasm? I don't know, it sounded completely made up, but it felt very real when I was scrubbing yellow stains out of the carpet at 3 AM.

And because they poop eighty-five times a day, their skin gets so raw. Dr. Lin said the constant moisture causes dermatitis, so Dave and I were nervously slathering zinc cream on baby skin like we were frosting a terrible, angry cake. Anyway, the point is, you just have to wait. When you think they're done, stand there and stare at the wall for a full sixty seconds before you even touch the velcro tabs. Keep a clean diaper shoved under the dirty one as a blast shield.

This is exactly why you need things like the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie. Look, it's just a onesie. I'm not going to pretend a piece of clothing changed my life or saved my marriage. It's fine. But it has those stretchy envelope shoulders, so when the blowout inevitably travels halfway up their spine, you can pull the whole thing DOWN over their legs instead of dragging a biohazard over their face. Plus, it's organic, which is great because their skin is so weirdly sensitive in those early days and I was constantly terrified of synthetic fabrics giving them rashes.

Minivans and unsolicited advice

Pete apparently bought a custom stealth "dad van" off eBay equipped with a mini-fridge and a baby formula maker, which is honestly the most absurdly chaotic rich-guy thing I've ever heard, so just buy a regular insulated bottle cooler bag and get on with your life.

But he also talked about how strangers are constantly giving him parenting tips now, and he said Eddie Murphy told him the best advice is literally "no advice." Which, first of all, Eddie Murphy has like ten kids. TEN. My uterus just tried to leave my body thinking about that. But he's right! People will say anything to you. I remember being at the grocery store with Leo when he was maybe three weeks old. I was wearing him in one of those confusing fabric wrap things that make you feel like a sweaty human burrito, and some woman—she was wearing a visor indoors, which tells you everything you need to know—tapped my shoulder to tell me he looked too hot. It was August. In Florida. I spent the entire drive home crying and frantically googling if I was boiling my child alive.

I read somewhere later—maybe on a WHO website, or maybe it was just a random Instagram infographic I saw at 4 AM, who really checks these things anymore—that "responsive parenting" is the only thing that actually matters. You just have to respond to YOUR specific kid's cues. Not arbitrary rules from Visor Lady in aisle four. If they're crying, pick them up. If they're hungry, feed them. It sounds simple, but when you're running on two hours of fragmented sleep, you start hallucinating that everyone else was handed a secret manual at the hospital that you missed out on.

(If you're currently stress-scrolling while nap-trapped and just want to feel like you've your life together for five minutes, go browse Kianao's organic baby clothes and pretend you're the kind of mom who does aesthetic neutral laundry.)

When the adrenaline wears off

This was the part that seriously made me stop and put my coffee down. Pete talked about coming down from the "baby high." That initial rush of adrenaline when they hand you the baby and you're surrounded by nurses and balloons and casseroles, and then suddenly... everybody leaves. And you're just standing in your kitchen at midnight realizing, "Oh god, she's here. She's staying. This is forever."

Dave had this exact same existential crisis. I swear to god. We don't really talk about the dads because, hell, we're the ones bleeding and wearing mesh underwear and crying in the shower, but the mental crash for the non-birthing partner is wild. Dr. Lin kind of mentioned in passing at our two-month checkup that paternal postnatal depression is honestly super common? Like one in ten guys get it. Because their entire identity just shatters overnight, and the massive, suffocating reality of keeping a human alive drops on them like an anvil in a cartoon.

I remember waking up one night and finding Dave in the kitchen holding a bottle, just staring blankly at the microwave timer. He looked so hollow. Every blog post tells you to "communicate openly" and "practice mindfulness" and "schedule intimacy," which makes me want to throw my phone into the ocean. You can't mindfulness your way out of chronic sleep deprivation. Instead of forcing him to talk about his feelings or taking a romantic walk or whatever, we just had to stumble through the darkness together and realize that sometimes getting out of your own head means just washing the breast pump parts without being asked. Just keeping your hands busy until the panic finally subsides.

The teething nightmare that breaks you

Oh, and since you're trying to remember the bad parts so you can be a supportive friend, don't forget the teething. Absolute nightmare. Seriously. Not even kidding.

Remember when Maya was like six months old and I caught her aggressively gnawing on my dirty house keys because I was too tired to stop her? Her cheeks were bright red, she was drooling through four bibs an hour, and she hadn't slept for more than forty minutes at a time.

If you're going to buy a baby gift, or if you're just hoarding things for yourself, you desperately need the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy. I'm violently passionate about this little panda. I bought three of them. I kept one in the diaper bag, one in the freezer, and I definitely found one buried in the couch cushions months later. It's 100% food-grade silicone, which I really started caring about after reading some terrifying article about plastics leaking into mouths. The bamboo detail is cute, but honestly? I just loved that it was flat and perfectly shaped for her fat little hands to hold independently. I'd hand it to her, she would violently chew on the panda's ears, and I'd get exactly five minutes of silence to microwave my coffee for the third time.

We also had the Wooden Baby Gym | Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys. It's nice! It didn't clash with my living room rug and wasn't made of loud, blinking, screaming plastic, which was a massive win for my overstimulated brain. Maya mostly just lay under it trying to pull the wooden elephant down into her mouth, but it gave me a safe place to put her while I desperately tried to fold laundry.

So anyway

The point of all this, past Sarah, is that nobody knows what they're doing. Not me, not you, not Pete Davidson. You're going to go to your friend's house, and she's going to be crying because the baby won't latch, and you're just going to sit on the floor with her and tell her that it's okay to hate it right now. Because the newborn phase is basically just surviving a hazing ritual with someone you just met.

Now take a deep breath, throw away that iced coffee, and go be a good friend.

Love,
Future, Slightly More Rested Sarah

P.S. Before you completely lose your mind trying to figure out what to put in a baby gift basket, go check out the rest of the sustainable, non-toxic baby gear at Kianao. It takes the guesswork out of trying to be an eco-conscious parent when you're too tired to read labels.

FAQs: Because I know you're still googling everything at 3 AM

How long do I wait to change a poopy diaper?
Honestly? Give it a full minute after you think they're done. Just stand there. The cold air hits their skin when you open the diaper and it almost always triggers a second wave. Shove a clean diaper underneath the dirty one before you wipe, or you're going to be doing laundry at 4 AM.

Is the whole "dad van" setup genuinely necessary for travel?
No. Pete Davidson is rich and chaotic. You absolutely don't need to wire a mini-fridge and a formula maker into your Honda Civic. Just get a decent insulated bottle bag with an ice pack and accept that traveling with a baby means stopping at random gas stations to feed them.

How do you genuinely ignore unsolicited advice?
It's so hard because your postpartum hormones make you second-guess everything. But you just have to nod, say "wow, thanks," and immediately delete it from your brain. Your baby, your rules. Eddie Murphy was right—the best advice is no advice.

Does the "baby high" adrenaline crash happen to everyone?
Pretty much, yeah. And it hits partners really hard, too. Paternal postnatal depression is a real thing that nobody warns you about. When the guests leave and it's just you guys staring at a crying newborn, the panic sets in. It gets better, but you just have to survive those first few weeks of shock.

Are silicone teethers seriously better than the liquid-filled ones?
Yes, oh my god, yes. I had one of those cheap liquid-filled ones burst once and I basically went into cardiac arrest panicking over what my kid just swallowed. 100% food-grade silicone is durable, you can still pop it in the fridge to cool it down, and you don't have to worry about weird toxic goo leaking out.