Decoding the 3 AM Baby Grunting Sounds Without Losing Your Mind
I'm standing barefoot on the cold Portland hardwood at 3:14 AM, holding my phone flashlight at a weird angle so I don't accidentally blind my daughter, just waiting for her to make the noise again. Don't do this. Seriously, whatever...
The Panic Over Getting a Baby Helmet for Flat Head Syndrome
Dr. Lin pulled out a pair of large plastic calipers, and my stomach immediately dropped. We were at the four-month checkup, and I had fully expected a standard firmware update—weigh him, check his reflexes, use the scheduled vaccines, and send...
How a Baby Horse Name Crashed My Naming Spreadsheet
I was staring at row 842 of my master Google Sheet when the system finally broke down. Column A contained the potential name. Column B tracked the syllable count. Column C was tied to a Python script I wrote to...
How To Make Your Baby Laugh Without Completely Losing Your Mind
It was a Tuesday. 4:15 PM, to be exact, and the afternoon light in our living room was doing that weird, aggressive glare thing that makes dust motes look like tiny judgment fairies. I was wearing leggings that hadn’t been...
My Disastrous Attempt at Raising a Pokémon Fan (And What Worked)
It was a Tuesday in 2019, I was running on maybe three hours of broken sleep, wearing a pair of Target leggings that smelled vaguely of sour milk, and I decided this was the perfect moment to introduce my then-two-year-old...
The Messy Truth About Ditching the Plastic Jungle for a Wooden Play...
I was sitting on the floor of my living room at two in the morning, nursing my oldest son, Beau, while a plastic mechanical toucan aggressively flashed red and blue strobe lights into my sleep-deprived retinas. The toy was attached...
Debugging 3 AM Meltdowns With The Happiest Baby On The Block
Here's exactly what you shouldn't do when your system goes down at three in the morning: try to read the manual by the light of a camping headlamp while bouncing on an exercise ball and holding a screaming infant like...
Do Babies Cry In The Womb? What Those Ultrasound Scans Really Mean
When my wife was twenty weeks pregnant with our twin girls, we received exactly three pieces of deeply conflicting, entirely unsolicited advice within a forty-eight-hour window. My mother-in-law insisted we needed to play Mozart pressed directly against the bump to...
Lil Baby Freestyle Lyrics: Why My Playlist Had To Change
It was raining sideways on Michigan Avenue and my Uber driver was blasting what sounded like an underground club mix at two in the afternoon. I was wedged in the back seat with my four-month-old, frantically trying to cup my...