How A Weird Little Platypus Baby Cured My Milestone Anxiety

I was sitting on the freezing hexagonal tiles of our extremely cramped downstairs bathroom at 3:14 AM wearing a pair of Dave's gym shorts that I’d aggressively rolled up at the waist and a nursing tank covered in what I was intensely praying was just spit-up. Maya was four months old at the time and doing that weird grunting thing she did instead of actually sleeping. I had my phone brightness turned all the way down to a tiny sliver, panic-googling why she wasn't rolling over yet. I had cold, half-drank coffee from yesterday sitting on the edge of the tub. I was convinced I was ruining her. Like, entirely ruining her life because some app on my phone with a pastel interface told me she should be doing gymnastics by now.

Dave walks in, steps entirely over my outstretched legs to pee, and tells me—completely out of nowhere, at three in the morning—that he just read a platypus baby is called a puggle. I almost divorced him right there on the bathmat.

But then he sat on the edge of the tub next to my gross old coffee and started telling me all these weird facts about them that he found on some late-night Reddit spiral. And honestly? It kind of rewired my whole brain. Before that night, I believed every baby had this rigid corporate timeline they had to hit. You sit at six months, crawl at eight, walk at twelve, or you're going to fail at life and never get into college. But nature? Nature is an absolute, chaotic mess.

Swimming lessons can wait because nobody actually knows anything

Here's what my doctor, Dr. Miller—who has the bedside manner of a very tired but deeply kind golden retriever—told me when I finally went into his office crying about the whole rolling-over thing. He said human infants are basically just compiling their operating systems at their own speeds and that we put way too much pressure on them. Which, sure, sounds great. But the platypus thing makes it so much clearer in my head.

A baby platypus literally lives in rivers, right? They're semi-aquatic animals. Their whole brand is swimming. But when they hatch, they're blind, completely hairless, deaf, and the size of a lima bean. Like, under 50 grams. And they stay buried in a dirt hole for FOUR MONTHS before they even touch a single drop of water. Four months! Imagine if a human mom was at a mommy-and-me class like, "Yeah, my kid is going to be a water polo prodigy but right now he’s just gonna sit in a dark closet for a fiscal quarter to figure out his legs." We’d lose our minds.

Dave also told me they eventually learn to hunt using literal electrical impulses, which sounds like something out of a comic book, but the point is they get there when they get there. Anyway, the point is that realizing a wild animal can take a third of a year just to learn how to exist in its natural habitat made me feel so incredibly stupid for worrying about Maya not rolling over by Tuesday. She rolled over eventually. Now she's seven and does cartwheels in the living room and knocks over my plants. Sometimes I miss when she couldn't move.

Breastfeeding is basically a biological hazing ritual

Look, I could talk for hours about how weird it was trying to explain my loud, aggressive mechanical breast pump to four-year-old Maya when Leo was born, but apparently platypuses don't even have nipples. They just sort of sweat milk out of their abdominal skin and the babies lick it off their fur. I mean, hell. That makes my cracked nipples and all those midnight Haakaa sessions look like a luxury resort vacation. The animal kingdom is just a bunch of mammals winging it with whatever messy biology they were handed, so we probably shouldn't be so hard on ourselves when latching feels like a nightmare. Moving on.

The absolute nightmare that's the teething phase

I genuinely used to think teething was just, like, a few days of extra drool and maybe a mild fever. Oh god. I was so unbelievably innocent. The reality is that human babies just slowly push tiny, sharp knives out of their skulls for two straight years. And they let you know about it every single second of the day. Puggles actually have temporary teeth that they lose completely before they even leave their dirt burrow, and then they just mash their food with these weird keratin pads for the rest of their lives. Which honestly sounds way more efficient than whatever our kids are doing.

Since we can't just swap our babies' gums for keratin pads, we've to deal with the screaming. With Maya, I bought every ugly, chemical-smelling plastic teething ring on the market and she hated all of them. But by the time Leo started teething and drooling like a St. Bernard, I had wised up. I found this Panda Teether from Kianao and it was legitimately my actual favorite thing we owned for about eight months.

Story time: We were stuck in absolute gridlock traffic on the 405, Leo was doing that unhinged pterodactyl screech because a top incisor was trying to break through, and I blindly reached into the cooler bag and tossed this cold silicone panda into his car seat. Silence. Absolute, beautiful, big silence. It’s made of this food-grade silicone that gets incredibly, numbingly cold if you toss it in the fridge for ten minutes, which was exactly what his hot little gums needed. It’s also totally flat, so his clumsy, uncoordinated baby hands could really grip the little bamboo part without dropping it into the abyss of the car seat every three seconds. I used to just throw it in the top rack of the dishwasher every night because I refuse to hand wash anything that doesn't strictly require it. It survived everything.

If you're also deep in the drool trenches right now and losing your mind, you can browse some of their teething stuff and maybe save yourself the 3 AM Amazon panic-buying spiral that I fell into so many times.

Wrapping them in bubble wrap isn't an option

Did you know male platypuses grow literal venomous spurs on their ankles? Venom! Like a snake! I thought childproofing a glass coffee table was stressful, imagine if your toddler could medically poison you if they kicked you during a diaper change. Nature is terrifying.

We don't have venom to worry about with our human babies, thank god, but we do have basically everything else. When we had Maya, our living room looked like a primary-colored plastic factory had exploded. Everything flashed, beeped, or sang a tinny electronic song that still periodically haunts my nightmares when I close my eyes. I thought babies needed all that noise to be "stimulated."

By the time Leo arrived, I was so overstimulated myself that I wanted things that didn't make me want to pull my hair out. We got the Wooden Baby Gym with the little hanging animals. It’s... fine. It's really pretty, honestly, and it didn’t make my living room look like a chaotic daycare center, which my anxiety appreciated. Leo liked batting at the little wooden elephant and the textured rings for a few months. But honestly? It's a baby gym. He used it for a hot minute and then decided that rolling away to try and eat a stray Cheerio off the rug was way more intellectually stimulating. It’s good for what it's, it's sturdy and non-toxic, but they just outgrow that stationary phase so fast.

What you do use forever, though, are bodysuits. Oh man. I didn't realize how much the actual fabric mattered until Maya broke out in this horrible, angry red eczema rash right across her belly when she was about six months old. I was putting cortisone on it and freaking out. Dr. Miller looked at it and suggested it was probably contact dermatitis from the cheap synthetic dyes and polyester in her fast-fashion onesies. I felt like such a failure.

I panic-donated her whole drawer and swapped everything to the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit style. I'm not kidding, her skin cleared up in like a week. They don't use harsh chemical dyes, it’s just super breathable organic cotton with a tiny bit of elastane so you can genuinely stretch the neck hole over their giant, wobbly heads without them screaming bloody murder. The fabric is thick, too. Like, it survived at least forty distinct blowout washes in our terrible apartment washing machine without losing its shape or getting that weird pill-y texture.

Parenting is just an endless, exhausting mess of trial and error. You're winging it, the baby is winging it, the weird little platypus in the river is winging it while sweating milk and waiting a third of a year to learn how to swim. If you can manage to just ignore the internet forums and accept that your kid is compiling their own messy operating system on their own highly specific timeline, you might genuinely get to enjoy sitting on the bathroom floor drinking your yesterday-coffee in peace.

Ready to make your wildly unpredictable parenting journey slightly more aesthetically pleasing and significantly less toxic? Explore Kianao's organic cotton baby essentials here before your kid decides to start crawling in the wrong direction.

Some incredibly unscientific but very real answers to your questions