The ugly truth about that baby alive doll hiding in your playroom
I'm standing over my kitchen sink at eleven at night with a pair of surgical tweezers, trying to extract a solid black clump of fermented synthetic cherry mush from the plastic esophagus of a toy. This is not how I...
Surviving The Ash Baby Look And Other Sweaty Newborn Disasters
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was staring at Leo under the harsh bathroom vanity light, wearing a nursing bra that smelled aggressively of sour milk and my husband Dave's oversized college sweatpants. Leo was three weeks...
The V1.0 Stroller Bug: Why My First Hardware Purchase Failed
It's 43 degrees, pouring that specific sideways Portland rain, and I'm violently kicking the back left wheel of a $900 piece of baby gear while my wife Sarah watches from the passenger seat of our Honda Civic. This was my...
The Truth About Surviving Your Own Baby Shower
I was thirty-one weeks pregnant, sitting on my incredibly dusty apartment floor in Chicago, staring at a mountain of tissue paper while my mother-in-law asked why I hated color. She had wanted royal blue balloons everywhere. I had asked for...
Surviving the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps With Three Under Five
I was sitting on the nursery floor at 2:14 AM with my oldest, staring at a $400 emergency room bill for what turned out to be entirely normal teething pain, when I realized we were financially drowning. He was screaming,...
The Baby Beluga Musician Was Right About Everything All Along
The radiator in our Chicago apartment was making that rhythmic clicking sound it only makes at three in the morning. My toddler was executing a flawless, rigid back-arch scream, the kind that usually shows either a dropped pacifier or a...
The Beanie Baby Delusion: Why I Booted My Childhood Collection
I was standing ankle-deep in fiberglass insulation in my parents' attic last Thanksgiving, holding a massive, dust-caked Rubbermaid tub. Inside was what my 1998 brain calculated to be roughly $40,000 worth of brightly colored plush toys. I actually looked at...
Buying schΓΆne kleider fΓΌr kinder: A dad's dress debugging
It was 7:14 AM on a Tuesday when the mobility crisis officially peaked. My eleven-month-old daughter, Maya, was stranded in the middle of our living room rug, her knees firmly pinned to the floor by an excessive layer of synthetic...
A Letter to Past Me: How to Build a Real baby geschenkkorb
Dear Sarah from last October, I know exactly where you're right now. Youβre standing in the middle of the baby aisle at MΓΌller at 7:45 PM on a Tuesday. Youβre wearing those black maternity leggings that you absolutely refuse to...