When do babies start clapping: a letter to my panicked past self
Dear Priya from six months ago. You're currently sitting on the jute rug in the living room. Your knees hurt. You have sung some variation of pat-a-cake forty-seven times today. Your coffee is cold and your eight-month-old is staring at...
When Babies Pull to Stand: The Messy, Exhausted Reality
I was wearing my favorite black leggingsβthe ones with the questionable yogurt stain on the left knee that I'd just sort of given up on washing out entirelyβand holding my third cup of lukewarm coffee. It was a Tuesday at...
What Nobody Tells You About the Clapping Milestone
I was sitting cross-legged on my living room rug, completely covered in pulverized Cheerios and dog hair, aggressively patting my hands together while chanting "yay!" like a deranged cheerleader. My oldest son, Tucker, who was about ten months old at...
The 3 AM Plastic Crisis & The Truth About Baby Einstein Toys
It was 3:17 in the morning, November 2017, and I was wearing my husband Dave's oversized college sweatpants with an unidentified gray stain on the knee. I was doing that frantic, desperate bounce-sway dance with my four-month-old daughter Maya, who...
Surviving the First Five Years: A Twin Dad's Messy Guide
Yesterday at 6:15 AM, I found myself holding a dollop of peanut butter on a baby spoon, staring at my daughter Florence like I was defusing a bomb, while her sister Matilda was busy trying to lick the skirting board....
When Do Babies Start Talking? My Meltdown And What I Learned
I was sitting on the sticky laminate floor of the community center at 10:45 AM, wearing black leggings that definitely had dried yogurt crusted on the left knee, while a 14-month-old named Brayden pointed at a plastic truck and clearly...
Why I Stopped Treating the Baby Growth Chart Like a High Score
It was a bleak Tuesday morning in November, and I was standing barefoot on the cold bathroom tiles, holding a completely naked, furiously wriggling two-year-old on a digital scale, trying to do basic mental subtraction while she actively attempted to...
Confessions: Why a Plastic Bag is a Terrible Baby Keepsake Box
I'm currently sitting cross-legged on a heavily stained rug at two in the morning, holding a small, crinkled ziplock bag that looks suspiciously like evidence from a low-budget crime scene. Inside is a tiny, pale wisp of hair. I know,...
The Truth About Creating a Baby Map: Inside the Womb and Out
Listen, thirty-four weeks pregnant, I was sitting on my Chicago apartment's bathroom tiles at two in the morning with a purple washable marker, poking my own abdomen. The snow was coming down hard outside, and my late-night search history was...