Why my timeline for a new baby sister is completely broken
I was staring at a plastic stick with two bright pink lines on our bathroom counter, right next to a half-chewed rice rusk that Leo, my 11-month-old, had abandoned to go fight the bath mat. My wife picked up the...
Normal Baby Weight at Birth: A Letter to My Terrified Past Self
Dear Tom from six months ago. You're currently hiding in the downstairs loo at a family barbecue, trying to field questions from your brother-in-law about what constitutes a normal baby weight. His wife is being induced on Tuesday, and you're...
Surviving Baby Daycare: What I Believed vs What Actually Happened
I'm currently sitting in a 2014 Skoda Estate, engine off, staring blankly at a laminated sign that reads "Little Acorns" through a windscreen smeared with what I sincerely hope is just mashed banana. My twin daughters, Isla and Freya, are...
Surviving the Chaos: The Truth About Raising a One-Year-Old
I was on my hands and knees, using a blunt butter knife to scrape a disturbing amount of smashed avocado out of the grooves of our Victorian skirting board, when I realised the greatest lie of modern parenting. The lie...
Dear Past Me: The Truth About Baby Rudin And Math Milestones
Dear Sarah of exactly six months ago, You're currently sitting on the cold kitchen floor in Leo's old oversized Ninja Turtles hoodie, aggressively googling baby Rudin while eating stale Goldfish crackers out of a plastic bag at 2:14 AM. You're...
Hydrocephalus Baby: The 2 AM ER Trip That Changed Our Entire Lives
I remember the exact hum of the vending machine in the Lubbock pediatric ER. It was somewhere around three in the morning. I hadn't washed my hair in four days, I was wearing leggings permanently covered in lint from packing...
The Absurd Truth About Searching For Lil Baby Albums Online
"Play Mozart or he'll fail third-grade math," my mother-in-law practically whispered into my ear at my baby shower, aggressively shoving a CD into my hands. Yes, an actual, physical compact disc in a jewel case. Who even owns a CD...
The terrifying physics of your first garden baby swing setup
I'm standing in our damp, aggressively overgrown London garden, holding twenty feet of braided nylon rope and staring at a branch on our neighbor's encroaching oak tree, while Florenceβwho's supposed to be sitting quietly on a blanketβattempts to eat a...
Exactly what vaccines do babies get? A twin dad's messy guide
We were sitting in the waiting room of our local GP surgery, surrounded by faded posters from 1998 warning about the dangers of excessive screen time, which felt deeply ironic given I was desperately playing a brightly coloured cartoon on...