The 2 month old baby survival protocol: sleep, poop, and panicking ...
Listen, it's three in the morning and you're staring at the ceiling while your kid makes pterodactyl noises in the bassinet next to you. Your auntie's voice is echoing in your head, insisting that if you just put some rice...
Dear Past Marcus: A Debugging Guide to the Basic Baby Onesie
It's 3:14 AM in our drafty Portland apartment, and I'm holding my screaming four-month-old son at arm's length like he's a live explosive device. The incident has breached containment. A toxic, mustard-yellow substance has defied the elastic boundaries of his...
The Michelin Man Myth: Dressing Your Baby for Winter Survival
It was November 2017, and I was standing in a Target parking lot sweating through my deodorant while the actual air temperature was roughly twenty-eight degrees. Maya was four months old at the time. I was wearing yoga pants that...
Stop Trying to Swaddle With a Receiving Blanket
It was 3 AM in late January. The wind off Lake Michigan was rattling our bedroom windows, and my daughter was doing the newborn startle reflex thing. She looked like she was trying to conduct a tiny, frantic orchestra in...
Dressing a newborn without panicking (was ziehe ich meinem baby an)
It was 2:14 in the morning during a particularly brutal Chicago February when I found myself hovering over my two-week-old's crib, completely paralyzed by a fleece onesie. I had spent six years in pediatric nursing. I had managed ventilators, calculated...
The terrifying truth about having a nec baby in the NICU
It was 3:17 am on a Tuesday when the alarms changed their tune. Not the rhythmic, steady chirp of the standard heart monitor weβd grown intimately accustomed to over two weeks in the NHS neonatal unit, but a frantic, high-pitched...
My Late Night Freakout Over Purple Lacy Skin and What I Know Now
It was October 2017, and my daughter Maya was exactly eleven days old. I remember this specifically because I was wearing an oversized grey nursing tank that I hadn't washed since we left the hospital, and I had a half-empty...
The Messy, Exhausting Truth About Buying Newborn Baby Clothes
I was staring at a literal miniature three-piece tweed suit. It had suspenders. A bow tie. It was hung on a tiny velvet hanger in my freshly painted nursery, and I remember standing there, holding a lukewarm cup of coffee...
The hospital triage guide to surviving newborn baby kleding
It was 3:14 AM when I finally understood what true defeat tasted like. I was standing over a changing pad in the dark, wrestling with a pair of miniature denim overalls made for a creature that weighed eight pounds. The...