Why parents who try to watch baby driver get weird search results
My mom called on a Tuesday to say I needed to buy a "baby driver" immediately because that's supposedly how I learned to walk in 1993. Four hours later, my frontend lead Slacked me a link saying I had to...
Debugging The Farm Book: What Do We Actually Call A Baby Goat?
It's 5:43 AM and my brain is currently running on safe mode. My 11-month-old son is sitting on my lap, aggressively pointing a sticky, banana-coated index finger at page four of a cardboard farm book. I'm staring at an illustration...
Why the Trisha Paytas Baby Drama Makes Me Rethink Parenting
Don't crowd-source your baby's identity on the internet, and definitely don't let your mother-in-law's passive-aggressive text messages dictate how you announce your kid to the world. I learned this the hard way when I created a literal feedback form for...
What My Pediatrician Said About Playing Lil Baby Around My Toddler
My brother-in-law swore that playing heavy trap beats would make my son sleep through absolutely anything. My mother-in-law heard ten seconds of a track and claimed I was ruining his spiritual aura. My doctor just blinked at me tiredly and...
Watching The 1995 Baby-Sitters Club Movie As An Overthinking Dad
My mom told me the absolute best way to get a break from parenting is to just hire the 14-year-old kid who lives across the street because "she seems nice and probably knows CPR." My lead developer, a guy who...
Navigating Spare Ribs vs Baby Back Ribs With An 11-Month-Old
I was halfway through a surprisingly decent potato salad at my buddy Dave’s backyard cookout in Southeast Portland when I looked over and saw him handing my 11-month-old daughter a massive, sauce-drenched pork rib. My brain basically threw a fatal...
The 3 AM Monitor Panic: Surviving The Stomach Sleeping Phase
The glowing screen of the baby monitor was blinding in the pitch-black bedroom, and my heart was hammering against my ribs at roughly 140 beats per minute. It was 3:14 AM. The temperature in the nursery was exactly 69.4 degrees,...
When Do Babies Get Measles Vaccine? A Portland Dad's Guide
I was sitting in Dr. Lin's examination room with a color-coded spreadsheet printed on actual paper, which should tell you everything about my mental state at the time. My daughter was six months old, we were exactly three weeks out...
Debugging The Drool Firmware: When Do Babies Teeth Come In?
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and the Portland rain was actively mocking my sanity by drumming a steady, chaotic beat against the bedroom window. The baby, who usually just gives a polite little squawk when he wants milk,...