The Great Baby Book Delusion: Expectations vs Actual Reality
I'm currently looking at a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar that has been so thoroughly chewed, sucked, and dismantled by my twin two-year-old daughters that it looks less like a beloved piece of children's literature and more like something...
Why That Bestselling Parenting Manual Won't Actually Save Your Sanity
You're sitting in the semi-dark at 3:14 AM, the harsh blue light of your phone illuminating a stack of pristine, unread hardcovers on your nightstand while your newborn does that weird pterodactyl screech. You bought all of them when you...
How the Peppa Pig New Baby Episode Saved My Sanity With Two Kids
I was sitting squarely on the cold bathroom tile, staring cross-eyed at two pink lines on a plastic stick, while my two-year-old was actively trying to flush my best Mac contour brush down the toilet. He paused his plumbing experiment,...
Why searching for the cast of baby reindeer will ruin your evening
It was 5:17 AM on a Tuesday, an hour that shouldn't legally exist, and my living room looked like a crime scene involving a half-eaten box of oat biscuits and an aggressively smeared syringe of sticky, strawberry-flavoured Calpol. Florence, the...
How I Abandoned Indie Music to Become a Human Jukebox for Twins
Somewhere around the eighty-fourth consecutive rendition of The Wheels on the Bus, you experience a big sort of ego death. I was standing in the kitchen at 6am, wearing a t-shirt entirely crusted in dried porridge, aggressively miming the swish-swish-swish...
The 3AM Kitchen Intruder: Dealing With Baby Roaches
It was 3:14 AM, and I was doing something I explicitly knew I shouldn't be doing. Maya, who's two years old but possesses the demanding palate of a Michelin-star food critic, refused to go back to sleep unless her milk...
The 3AM Baby Monster Phase: Surviving Toddler Night Terrors
My mum told me to leave a small saucer of milk under the bed to appease the spirits. The bloke at our local pub, a man who has clearly not parented a child since 1982, suggested I simply tell the...
The Reality of Fitting a Baby Grand Piano in a House with Toddlers
I'm currently on my hands and knees in the lounge, holding one end of a metal tape measure while Maya, who's two, tries to eat the other end. Her twin sister, Lily, is repeatedly smashing a wooden spoon against the...
Surviving Backyard Baby Chicks When You Already Have A Toddler
We were standing in the middle of a farm supply store somewhere in the Illinois suburbs when my husband decided we needed to teach our two-year-old about food sustainability. He was holding a cardboard box that vibrated with high-pitched chirps,...