The 3 AM Reality of Raising a Baby Chick With a Toddler
It's three in the morning on a Tuesday. I'm standing over my bathroom sink with a warm, damp paper towel, delicately wiping dried feces off the backside of a baby chick. My husband is asleep. My toddler is asleep. I'm...
Why You Should Hand Your Six-Month-Old a Pork Rib Bone Today
My mother-in-law nearly dropped her chai when I handed my six-month-old a six-inch pork rib bone. We were sitting on the patio in late July. She looked at me like I had just handed the baby a loaded weapon. The...
How Baby ASL Fixed Our 11-Month-Old's Communication Bugs
At 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, I was holding a perfectly warmed, 98.6-degree bottle of formula out like a peace offering, while my eleven-month-old son shrieked like a dial-up modem failing to connect. I tried the bottle again. He slapped...
Analog QA Testing: Why I Replaced The Flashing Toys With Wood
It was exactly 3:14 AM when my bare heel made contact with the plastic singing cow. I was holding a half-asleep eleven-month-old, navigating the dark hallway by memory, when 180 decibels of synthesized banjo music erupted from the floorboards. The...
Letter to Past Marcus: Baby Rattlesnakes & Other Terrors
Hey Marcus from six months ago. It's me, future Marcus. You're currently sitting in the dark at 3:14 AM, the retina display of your phone burning a hole in your exhausted corneas because you tried to Google "best wooden baby...
The myth of the peacefully occupied infant (and how to survive a bu...
I currently have one foot planted firmly on a rogue piece of Tupperware, while the other is trying to gently slide a half-eaten rice cake out from under the sofa before the dog finds it. The twins, at two years...
The great baby toys invasion: A survival guide for tired parents
It's 4:13 in the morning, and I've just stepped barefoot onto a hard plastic sheep that immediately responded by bleating the alphabet into the dark, silent hallway. I froze, my foot hovering above the floorboards, waiting for the inevitable twin...
Navigating Baby Steps Nudity and Family Privacy (And Pants)
It was 7:13 AM on a Tuesday, and I was standing in my entryway wearing a stained NYU sweatshirt from 2009, holding a mug of coffee that had already gone cold because Iβd left it on the bathroom counter for...
The Baby Steps Game Disaster and How to Actually Teach Walking
It was somewhere around 3:17 in the morning, a time that I'm increasingly convinced exists solely to punish parents for their past life choices. Maya, the slightly more reasonable of my two-year-old twin daughters, was fast asleep in her cot,...