Magazine
Life with a newborn: Survival tactics from a tired pediatric nurse
I spent my first week at home with my son staring at a spreadsheet I built to track his bowel movements. It was three in the morning, my nursing scrub top was stained with spit-up, and I was holding a...
What Will My Baby Look Like (And Other Late Night Mysteries)
I was thirty-four weeks pregnant, sitting in the dark at two in the morning, paying a sketchy app five dollars to merge my face with my husband's. The result loaded on my phone screen and I just stared at it....
What Is a Rainbow Baby? The Complicated Truth
The monitor is beeping a steady, boring 145 beats per minute, but the woman on the paper-covered table is still holding her breath. She has her eyes squeezed shut, her hands gripping the plastic edges of the bed so hard...
When Can Babies See Color? My Real Experience With Newborn Vision
I'm standing in the middle of my oldest kid's nursery at 3 AM, holding him like a football, wondering why he's staring dead-eyed at the beige wall instead of the seventy-dollar organic cotton mobile I bought him. I'm exhausted, my...
The waiting game of motherhood: exactly when do babies smile
I was hanging over the bassinet at three in the morning making a sound I can only describe as a dying seal. Day forty-two of my maternity leave. I smelled like sour milk and desperation. I had spent the last...
The brutal reality of when do baby teeth come in for parents
The radiator in our Chicago apartment was making that rhythmic metallic clanking sound it only makes at three in the morning. I was sitting on the edge of the nursery glider, unbuttoning a soaked baby tee in the dark because...
The Midnight Panic: When Your Kid Finally Starts Kicking In There
It was exactly 2:14 AM. I know this because I was staring obsessively at the red digital clock on our microwave while sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor. I was wearing my husbandβs oversized, threadbare college t-shirt, crying softly into...
What Pediatric Nurses Actually Think About Your Bitty Baby Doll
I was working the Tuesday afternoon shift at the clinic when a panicked mother brought in her eighteen-month-old and a heavy, suspiciously damp cloth doll. The waiting room was already packed with the usual winter crud, but this case stood...
The Absolute Chaos of Raising Twins and a Baby German Shepherd
I'm currently watching a forty-pound creature with ears the size of satellite dishes attempt to herd my two-year-old daughters into the downstairs loo. The creature, a dog who seems entirely unaware that he's not currently employed on a farm in...