That First Slippery Baby Pear And The Constipation Chronicles
My thumb was covered in aquaphor and desperation. It was day four of the great solid-food bowel strike, and my son was looking at me like I had betrayed him. Starting solids at six months is heavily romanticized on the...
The Great Padded Donut Deception: A Father's Baby Nest Confession
I was standing in the middle of our cramped London flat at 3:17 a.m., holding what looked like an oversized, over-engineered dog bed, desperately trying to remember which twin I had just fed. Maya was wailing from the Moses basket,...
Surviving the Chaos of Smoking Baby Back Ribs With Toddlers
It was 4:13 PM on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and I was wearing my absolute favorite, completely impractical white linen top from Zara. I don't know why I wore white. It was an act of extreme hubris. My husband,...
When Can You Tell the Gender of a Baby? A Dad's Data Timeline
I was sitting in my ergonomic office chair, hitting CMD+R on my Gmail inbox every forty seconds like I was waiting for a server deployment to finish. We were at week ten of the pregnancy. Somewhere in the cloud, a...
What I Wish I Knew Before Googling Dwarf Baby Tears
Dear Sarah of November 14th, currently sitting on the cold bathroom tile at 3:17 AM in yesterday's yogurt-stained Lululemon leggings. You have your phone in one hand and a screaming four-month-old Leo in the other, and you're desperately typing things...
Spare Ribs vs Baby Back Ribs: A Dadβs Guide to Debugging Toddler BBQ
I was standing at the meat counter of our neighborhood New Seasons in Portland, panic-googling whether "baby back" meant the ribs actually came from a baby pig. My wife Sarah was three aisles over dealing with a minor avocado-related meltdown...
Dear Past Me: The Messy Truth About Having a Lip Tie Baby
Dear Sarah of exactly six months ago, You're currently sitting on the undersized, aggressively cheerful yellow chair in Dr. Vanceβs pediatric dental waiting room. Itβs a Tuesday. You're wearing those black leggings that have a hole near the left knee,...
Debugging Mealtime: The Hunt for Non Toxic Baby Plates
I was standing in our kitchen at 6:15 AM on a Tuesday, holding a steaming "eco-friendly" bamboo baby plate that suddenly smelled exactly like the motherboard I accidentally fried during a college hackathon. My 11-month-old son, Leo, was banging his...
The Truth About Character Stuffed Animals And Nursery Aesthetics
My heel just found the exact center of a plastic cartoon pup's hard little nose at six in the morning, and as I hopped around the dark living room stifling a scream so I wouldn't wake the baby, I realized...