Magazine
That First Slippery Baby Pear And The Constipation Chronicles
My thumb was covered in aquaphor and desperation. It was day four of the great solid-food bowel strike, and my son was looking at me like I had betrayed him. Starting solids at six months is heavily romanticized on the...
The Great Padded Donut Deception: A Father's Baby Nest Confession
I was standing in the middle of our cramped London flat at 3:17 a.m., holding what looked like an oversized, over-engineered dog bed, desperately trying to remember which twin I had just fed. Maya was wailing from the Moses basket,...
Surviving the Chaos of Smoking Baby Back Ribs With Toddlers
It was 4:13 PM on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and I was wearing my absolute favorite, completely impractical white linen top from Zara. I don't know why I wore white. It was an act of extreme hubris. My husband,...
A Letter to Myself About the Absurdity of Smocked Baby Clothes
Dear Tom of six months ago. I know exactly where you're right now. You're standing in the upstairs bathroom at your mother-in-law's house, holding Maya at arm's length over the porcelain sink. You're staring at a Β£75 hand-smocked, pale blue...
Megan Walerius, Birth Plans, and the Chaos of Expectations
When we announced the twins were on the way, I received three distinct pieces of advice within a forty-five-minute window at my local pub. My mother, clutching a small glass of sherry, told us to simply let nature take its...
Raising A Linxia Baby: The Unfiltered Truth About Newborn Life
I was standing in the Target baby aisle at 9 PM on a Tuesday, completely dead inside, while my oldest son Jackson screamed against my chest in a carrier that I was probably wearing wrong. He was three weeks old....
The ugly truth about deep cleaning your reusable cloth diapers
I was standing over the changing table last November, the Chicago wind rattling the windowpanes, pulling a supposedly fresh cloth diaper off my toddler. It smelled exactly like the gerbil enclosure at a rundown pet store. I had washed that...
When Can You Tell the Gender of a Baby? A Dad's Data Timeline
I was sitting in my ergonomic office chair, hitting CMD+R on my Gmail inbox every forty seconds like I was waiting for a server deployment to finish. We were at week ten of the pregnancy. Somewhere in the cloud, a...
Debugging the Desert: Surviving a Baby Scorpion in the Nursery
It was 2:14 AM in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was scanning the baseboards of our Airbnb with a blacklight flashlight I had overnighted from Amazon, looking for what I can only describe as a hardware glitch in nature. My 11-month-old...