My Guide to Surviving a Childrens Wear Sale Without Going Broke
I was standing in the middle of a fluorescent-lit mega-store with sweat actively pooling in my lower back, bouncing a screaming six-month-old on my hip while trying to wrestle a bright orange, plastic-feeling puffer coat into my shopping cart simply...
The Great Knee Blowout: Finding the Best Leggings for Girls
It was 7:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was sitting on the laundry room floor with a hot iron, trying to fuse a denim star patch over a gaping hole in a pair of hot pink pants while my...
Brutally honest gifts for babies that parents actually want
I was sitting at a baby shower in Naperville last weekend when they brought out the main event. A massive, cellophane-wrapped basket towering with newborn-sized denim jackets, stiff canvas shoes that looked like tiny torture devices, and a neon plastic...
The Unvarnished Truth About Buying Clothes For Your Tiny Human
My mother stood in our hallway on a mild Tuesday in October, clutching an aggressively knitted yellow cardigan and informing me that my newborn twins were minutes away from clinical hypothermia. Twenty minutes later, the NHS health visitor arrived, took...
The Truth About Designer Infant Clothes and Scratchy Tulle
I was sweating straight through my postpartum mesh underwear in the back seat of a Ford F-150 somewhere on Highway 290, frantically trying to unfasten fourteen microscopic pearl buttons while my three-day-old newborn screamed like a banshee. It's funny how...
The brutal truth about shopping a baby clearance warehouse sale
The wind off Lake Michigan was whipping my hair into my mouth while I stood in a line wrapping around an industrial park in Skokie. I was six months pregnant, freezing, and holding a lukewarm decaf coffee, waiting for the...
The Only Realistic Baby Inventory A Panicked Parent Actually Needs
At week 24 of the pregnancy, I made the catastrophic mistake of asking three different people what we needed to buy for our impending human. My mom told me all we needed was love and a massive stack of cloth...
Why My Spreadsheet Strategy For Budget Baby Clothes Completely Failed
At 2:14 AM on a Tuesday, I was staring at a pivot table I'd built to calculate the exact cost-per-wear of an infant's wardrobe. My son was three months old at the time, and I was treating his closet like...
The Absolute Madness of Putting a White Baby Tee on an Infant
We're twenty minutes into what was supposed to be a civilized Sunday picnic in Regent's Park. I'm holding a lukewarm flat white, desperately trying to project an aura of calm competence. Florence and Matilda, my two-year-old twins, are wearing identical,...