The yellow menace: A twin dad's survival guide to baby shark toys
It's 4:12 in the morning. I'm standing in the hallway wearing nothing but mismatched socks and a pair of boxers that have seen significantly better days, violently negotiating with a water-activated plastic fish. The fish is singing. It has been...
Decoding the Baby Shark Lyrics Without Completely Losing It
It's 6:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I'm standing in my dimly lit Portland kitchen holding a rapidly cooling pour-over while my 11-month-old attempts to dismantle the lower cabinet hardware. He isn't crying, exactly. He's emitting this steady, rhythmic low-frequency...
Why I Finally Caved and Bought a Play Area for My Kids
It was a Tuesday morning in late 2017, and I was wearing a pair of black yoga pants that had a highly questionable smear of sweet potato puree on the left thigh. Maya was seven months old, which meant she...
The peanut butter baby protocol: Debugging a first allergen
Flashback to a misty Portland Tuesday about six months ago. My wife Sarah was in the other room on a muted Zoom call, and I was standing in the kitchen staring at a nine-dollar jar of organic, single-ingredient peanut butter...
The Baby Platypus Taught Me More About Parenting Than Books
When it came time to figure out how we were going to explain the birds and the beesβor just basic mammalian biologyβto our kid, I got three entirely different pieces of advice within a 24-hour window. My mother-in-law told me...
What I Learned Debugging Life With Baby Pigs
I'm currently sitting on the kitchen linoleum at 3:14 AM with a laser thermometer in one hand and a syringe of milk replacer in the other. My 11-month-old daughter is finally asleep upstairs after a brutal teething episode, and I'm...
Watching my kid fall off the playground cured my helicopter anxiety
The wind coming off Lake Michigan was aggressive enough to make my eyes water, but I couldn't blink. My two-year-old was fifteen feet up a rope climbing pyramid at Maggie Daley Park. His left foot was wedged between two cables....
The Myth That Ruined My Newborn Days (And The Baby Orangutan Fix)
I was wearing Tom's vintage college hoodieβthe gray one with the mysterious yellow mustard stain from 2014βand it was somewhere around 3:17 AM. Maya was three weeks old and screaming like I'd personally offended her entire bloodline. I had a...
The truth about kangaroo care and why itβs not just a photo op
The biggest lie we're sold about the immediate aftermath of birth is the glowing, serene Instagram photo where the mother, looking dewy and perfectly flushed, delicately holds her pristine newborn to her bare chest. Itβs framed as this beautiful, magical...