The Truth About When Your Baby Actually Sits Up
When my daughter Maya was five months old, I got three entirely different pieces of advice about her sitting up in the span of about twenty-four hours. My mother-in-law, bless her, came over and immediately started shoving Maya into the...
Why I Finally Ditched the Neon Plastic Baby Play Gym
It was a Tuesday, roughly 2:15 PM in late October 2017. Maya was exactly fourteen weeks old, and I was wearing a pair of dark grey maternity leggings that I had absolutely no intention of retiring anytime soon. They had...
Dear Past Marcus: Troubleshooting the Great Baby Mat Matrix
Row 47 of my "Baby Infrastructure" Google Sheet is where my sanity finally encountered a fatal error. It was 2:14 AM. The ambient temperature in the nursery was exactly 71.4 degrees, I had logged 11 wet diapers for the day,...
Why Most Infant Play Mats Are A Trap (And What Actually Works)
I was on my hands and knees in the middle of my living room, frantically trying to scrub curdled breastmilk out of a felt lionβs mane with a single dry baby wipe, while my three-month-old screamed like I was actively...
How I Finally Found a Play Activity Mat That Did Not Drive Me Crazy
When I was pregnant with my oldest, Tucker, I swear everybody had a loud opinion on where exactly the baby was supposed to exist when I wasn't holding him. My grandmother told me to just throw a handmade quilt on...
Why I Stopped Entertaining My Baby (And What Happened Next)
I was sitting on my living room floor in a puddle of my own postpartum sweat, aggressively waving a black-and-white high-contrast flashcard in my oldest sonβs face. He was eight months old at the time and violently uninterested, choosing instead...
The truth about baby play gyms and anhΓ€nger spielbogen
Three days after we brought my son home, my mother-in-law told me to hang bright gold bangles and noisy brass bells over his play mat to wake up his brain. An hour later, an influencer on my feed claimed that...
The Honest Truth About Newborn Floor Time and Baby Play Mats
Dear Sarah from exactly six months ago, You're currently sitting in the Target parking lot in your yoga pants with the hole in the crotch, violently tapping your steering wheel while Googling whether cheap foam floor tiles cause neurological damage....
Spielsachen 4 Jahre: The Truth About Toys For Four-Year-Olds
The most successful grift in the modern parenting industrial complex is the word "educational" slapped on a box containing a plastic, seizure-inducing nightmare. You know the exact toy I'm talking about. Itβs usually shaped like a dog or a heavily...