Debugging The Baby Pumpkin Costume: A First-Time Dad's Guide
The internal temperature of a synthetic plush gourd is roughly equivalent to the surface of the sun. I'm holding a screaming, bright orange sphere in the middle of a muddy Portland farm, desperately trying to find a zipper that apparently...
Baby Please Come Home: Surviving The First 48 Hours
Whatever you do, don't boldly tell the discharge nurse that you already configured the car seat hardware when your only actual training was skimming a YouTube Short on 1.5x speed. I learned this the hard way while sweating profusely in...
The Baby Park Survival Guide for Chronically Tired UK Parents
I'm currently crouched in the damp, questionable mulch of our local playground, forming a frantic human barricade around two tiny, drool-covered infants. To my left, a feral four-year-old is hurtling past wielding a half-eaten breadstick like a medieval javelin. To...
Why I Googled Baby Osama at 3 AM: TikTok Sleep Hacks Are Terrifying
It's 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, the nursery is precisely 69.4 degrees Fahrenheit, and my 11-month-old son has just executed his fourth unauthorized wake-up routine of the night. I'm sitting on the edge of the glider in the dark, scrolling...
Troubleshooting Cradle Cap: A New Dad's Guide to Safe Baby Oil
I was staring at a fake checkerboard background on a transparent image file at 3:14 AM while my eleven-month-old looked like a shedding reptile. I was trying to build a Notion database of non-toxic skincare for our household, right? Because...
Dear Past Tom: Why Using Baby Oil as Lube is a Terrible Idea
Dear Past Tom, It's 11:14 PM on a freezing Tuesday in November. By some absolute miracle of the parenting gods, the twins are both asleep at the exact same time. Maya, who usually treats sleep as a mild suggestion, has...
The brutally honest guide to choosing baby names boy edition
There's a pervasive, highly destructive lie floating around the maternity wards and NCT classes of Britain, and it goes something like this: don't worry if you haven't picked a name yet, because the second they hand him to you, you'll...
The brutal truth about choosing a baby mobile for crib survival
I was lying flat on my back on the reasonably clean portion of the nursery rug, my cheek pressed against a discarded Calpol syringe, watching a plastic hippo spin furiously at forty revolutions per minute while a tinny, slightly off-key...
Decoding the True Meaning of Baby (And Other Strange Slang)
I just had to explain the concept of nepotism over FaceTime while my 11-month-old attempted to eat a rogue USB-C cable. My mother-in-law had seen some hashtag on Twitter and wanted to know what the kids were talking about, which...