Magazine

A tired mother sorting through baby toys and organic blankets on a messy living room floor

Keeping your real newborn alive during the plastic toy craze

My mother-in-law told me to rub mustard oil in the baby's ears to prevent winter infections. My old charge nurse swore I had to wake him every two hours on the dot or his blood sugar would tank. The barista...

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Tired dad looking at a laptop with baby building blocks nearby

Figuring Out the New MAGA Baby Savings Account Without Losing It

My father-in-law texted me at 6:15 AM in all-caps about how the federal government is apparently handing out a free thousand bucks for my kid. Two hours later, a senior developer on my engineering team Slack-messaged me a doom-scroll thread...

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Exhausted dad trying to support two wobbly twin baby heads at once

The Terrifying Bobblehead Phase: Babies Holding Their Heads Up

My mother-in-law was holding Florence, who was precisely eighteen days old at the time, when she decided to gesture wildly with both hands while telling a long-winded story about a rogue fox in her garden. For three horrifying seconds, Florence’s...

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Exhausted mom checking her sick baby's temperature in the middle of the night

How to Reduce Fever in Baby Naturally Without Losing Your Mind

It was exactly 2:14 AM when my middle child, Carter, rolled over into my arm and felt like a literal baked potato fresh out of the oven. I'm talking radiating heat. I sat up in the dark, frantically feeling his...

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A tired dad holding a baby looking confused at a television screen

What Bridget Jones’s Baby Got Wrong About Real Parenting

Don't, under any circumstances, boot up Bridget Jones’s Baby at 11 PM on a Tuesday when your wife is 34 weeks pregnant and already convinced every random abdominal twinge is a catastrophic system failure. I learned this the hard way....

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A pediatric nurse explaining the history and medical reality behind 90s prenatal exposure myths.

The 90s Crack Baby Myth: What Prenatal Exposure Actually Means

When my cousin adopted a beautiful little girl from the grow system, the unsolicited opinions rolled in like a bitter Chicago winter storm. A neighborhood aunty whispered over cold chai that the child would be permanently broken because of her...

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Baby looking confused at a messy bowl of pureed food

The unspoken truth about baby rice cereal and starting solids

My mother-in-law was hovering by the kitchen island at two in the morning, holding a cardboard box of generic infant flakes and shaking it at my husband like it was a maraca. She whispered that if we just put a...

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A simple nursery setup with a wooden crib and neutral bedding

The Only Survival Gear You Actually Need for a Newborn

I was standing in the middle of aisle four with that stupid plastic scanning gun in my hand, watching my husband happily zap a $400 wipe warmer. I had to physically pry the scanner out of his grip. My brain...

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Baby bundled in winter layers looking out a frosty window

Baby Its Cold Outside: A Chicago Nurse's Winter Survival Guide

The wind coming off Lake Michigan felt like tiny shards of glass hitting my face. I was wedged in the back seat of my Honda CR-V, wrestling a screaming six-month-old out of a Michelin-man snowsuit while the heater blew pathetic...

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