Magazine
The Great Formula Panics: What I Learned About Feeding My Kid
It was 4:12 AM, I was holding a screaming, thrashing newborn, and my laptop screen was glowing in the dark with a massive spreadsheet titled Formula_Matrix_v4_FINAL.xlsx. My wife walked into the kitchen, looked at the screen, looked at my bloodshot...
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 Truth About Personalized Baby Blankets (A Hindsight Guide)
It was a Tuesday. 3 PM, raining, and I was wearing a nursing tank that smelled strongly of sour milk and desperation. Three-week-old Leo was finally asleep on my chest, and I was holding a dangerously lukewarm mug of coffee...
What Nobody Tells You About Having A Premature Baby At 33 Weeks
It was three in the morning on a Tuesday when the bradycardia alarm went off. The overhead lights in the neonatal intensive care unit were that specific shade of hospital fluorescent that makes everyone look mildly deceased. I was staring...
My Messy Journey With the Tula Carrier (And Why I Kept It)
It was a hundred and two degrees in July, right in the middle of a rural Texas Target parking lot, and my arms were bent backward like a stale pretzel. I was leaning heavily against the side of my minivan,...
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...
Dear Past Me: Please Put Down That Baby Percentile Calculator
Dear Jess from six months ago, You're currently sitting on the faded living room rug with a floppy yellow sewing tape measure in one hand and your phone in the other, furiously typing slightly inaccurate measurements into a baby percentile...
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....