A letter to my May self about the great toddler shorts strike
Listen, May Priya. You're sitting on the rug right now, watching your kid sweat through a pair of heavy fleece joggers while the Chicago spring decides to skip straight to eighty-five degrees and eighty percent humidity. You're holding a pair...
Spielzeug fΓΌr 3-JΓ€hrige: Ein ehrlicher Survival-Guide
Meine Mutter rief gestern aus dem Nichts an und meinte, wir brΓ€uchten fΓΌr meine Nichte Clara sofort eine 1,50 Meter hohe PlastikkΓΌche mit elektronischen BrutzelgerΓ€uschen, weil sie jetzt in "diesem Alter" sei. Unser Nachbar, dessen Kinder irgendwie immer aussehen, als...
Before & After: My Take on Spielzeug ab 2 Jahren for Toddlers
I was standing in the kitchen at 6:45 AM, holding a battery-operated plastic dump truck over the trash can like a priest performing an exorcism. My oldest was two at the time, and this truck had been singing the exact...
Surviving the Night Sweats: A Dadβs Guide to Bamboo Blankets
It was 2:14 AM in the middle of a freak Portland August heatwave, and the Nanit camera monitor above the crib was glowing with a red 78-degree warning. My son, who was about eight weeks old at the time, was...
How to survive the kinderzimmer einrichten phase without losing it
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant when I sat on the bare floor of our second bedroom in Chicago and cried over the smell of a dresser. We had just assembled a suspiciously cheap piece of nursery furniture I bought online....
My Desperate Search for "Spielzeug fΓΌr 1 JΓ€hrige" (Toys)
Yesterday at 5:14 AM, I staggered into the living room to grab a burp cloth and stepped directly onto a plastic cow that immediately began mooing "Old MacDonald" in a haunting, battery-depleted baritone. My 11-month-old daughter, sitting in her playpen,...
Spielzeug ab 3 Jahren: The Brutally Honest Guide for Parents
There I was, barefoot in my own living room at 6:30 in the morning, stepping squarely on a tiny plastic firefighter hat that came with some massive, overpriced fire truck my oldest got for his third birthday. Iβm just gonna...
Why buying boys dress pants is a specific kind of modern torture
I'm currently wedged next to the sanitary bin in the disabled toilet of a twelfth-century Surrey church, sweating completely through my only clean wedding suit, attempting to wrestle a screaming two-year-old into a pair of miniature, fiercely rigid navy slacks....
Why I Stopped Trusting the Internet About Early Development Toys
When my son was about four days old, my mother-in-law bought us a plastic command center that flashed strobe lights and yelled the alphabet in a robotic British accent. "He needs cognitive stimulation," she told me with absolute certainty. The...