What Nobody Tells You About Having A Premature Baby At 33 Weeks
It was three in the morning on a Tuesday when the bradycardia alarm went off. The overhead lights in the neonatal intensive care unit were that specific shade of hospital fluorescent that makes everyone look mildly deceased. I was staring...
Dear Jess: Surviving the Baby in Yellow Phase (And Other Shocks)
Dear Jess from six months ago, You're currently sitting on the peeling linoleum of the downstairs bathroom at 3 AM, holding your three-day-old up to the harsh vanity lights, trying to figure out if you're sleep-deprived and hallucinating or if...
The Great Puree Panic: Confessions From A Splattered Kitchen
There's currently a perfectly symmetrical, brilliantly orange splatter of sweet potato puree cooling on my left eyelid. It's Sunday at four in the afternoon, the sky over London has already surrendered to that bleak, bruised-plum colour of mid-winter, and I'm...
Staring Contests: When Do Babies' Eyes Actually Change Color?
It's 4:13 a.m. and I'm locked in a deeply unsettling staring contest with my daughter. The flat is entirely silent save for the hum of the fridge and the distant siren of a London ambulance, but in the dim amber...
Exactly Why Can't Babies Have Honey Before Their First Birthday
We were in Naperville at my in-laws' house for Sunday dinner. The baby was seven months old, teething heavily, and screaming with the kind of high-pitched intensity that makes your teeth vibrate. I stepped into the guest bathroom for exactly...
The 2 AM Baby Benadryl Panic and What I Actually Did Instead
It's 2:14 AM on a Tuesday in February. The wind off Lake Michigan is rattling the windowpanes of our Chicago apartment, and my toddler is sitting on the bathroom counter looking like a lightly boiled lobster. We had tried a...
Postpartum Baby Bangs: A Dad's Guide to the Hair Regrowth Glitch
Dear Marcus of six months ago: Put down the industrial drain snake and take a deep breath. I know you just pulled a clump of hair out of the shower drain that looks roughly the size of a wet squirrel,...
A Letter To My Past Self About Surviving An IUGR Baby Diagnosis
Dear Tom from exactly six months ago, You're currently sitting in the windowless, overly warm scanning room at St Thomas' Hospital, entirely oblivious to the fact that your life is about to tilt on its axis. The NHS sonographer has...
The clinical and emotional reality of dead babies in our world
Before I had my own kid, I thought I understood how the worst-case scenario worked. I used to sit in the pediatric ICU breakroom at three in the morning, drinking lukewarm coffee out of a styrofoam cup, charting the vital...