Why I Stopped Treating the Baby Growth Chart Like a High Score
It was a bleak Tuesday morning in November, and I was standing barefoot on the cold bathroom tiles, holding a completely naked, furiously wriggling two-year-old on a digital scale, trying to do basic mental subtraction while she actively attempted to...
The Brutal Truth About Baby Guinea Pigs Nobody Tells Parents
The teenager behind the counter at the pet store was casually explaining to a mother that if she touched her new baby guinea pig, the mother pig would smell human on the baby and eat it. I had to physically...
When You Become the Default Human Holder for Your Baby
It was four in the morning in mid-February, the kind of Chicago winter night where the radiators hiss aggressively and the air feels like dry ice. Maya was six weeks old and deep in the trenches of her peak colic...
Why I Threw Out Most Of Our Learning Toys And What Actually Survived
It was exactly 4:13 AM on a random Tuesday in November, and I was wearing my husband Dave’s oversized college sweatshirt which had a highly questionable yogurt stain on the left shoulder. I was holding a lukewarm mug of yesterday's...
Why the Nike Swoosh 1 Changed How I Think About Baby Shoes
It was a random Tuesday, maybe 9 AM, and I was wearing leggings that definitely hadn’t been washed since Sunday. I was hovering by the microwave, nursing my third cup of aggressively mediocre dark roast, when my mother-in-law dropped a...
The baby sis strikes back and other living room hostage situations
I'm sitting on the living room rug at two in the afternoon. The baby is asleep in the bassinet. My toddler is standing exactly three feet away, holding a rigid plastic triceratops, staring at the newborn with the kind of...
The Great Eye Colour Waiting Game: A London Dad's Guide to Melanin
My mother-in-law leaned over the Moses basket on day three and declared with absolute certainty that Twin B's eyes were definitely turning brown because she spotted some microscopic muddy flecks near the pupil. The NHS health visitor popped round on...
The Unvarnished Truth About Your Infant's Shifting Eye Colour
Dear Tom from eighteen months ago. You're currently sitting on the floor of the nursery at three in the morning, holding an iPhone torch uncomfortably close to Maya's face to see if her irises have developed any gold flecks, while...
Note to self on surviving the toddler sprint phase without crying
Dear Priya from six months ago. You're currently standing in the produce aisle at the Mariano's on Western Avenue. Your fourteen-month-old just dropped your hand. He is making a break for the automatic doors. You thought this was a phase...