The hostage negotiation of the sorry baby apology milestone
The soft rubber block bounced directly off my collarbone and landed in my lukewarm coffee. It splashed onto my only clean pair of leggings. My two-year-old stood across the living room, chest heaving, waiting for the fallout. I looked over...
The Baby John Phenomenon: Decoding Screen Time & Newborn Life
"Just put on that little animated kid, it's basically a mute button for crying," my lead engineer told me over Slack while I bounced a screaming infant on my knee. "If he looks at a screen before he's two, his...
The Truth About When Your Baby Will Actually Start Talking
It was late 2018, and I was sitting cross-legged on a primary-colored foam puzzle mat in a community center basement that smelled faintly of bleached diapers and absolute despair. I was wearing yoga pants that had definitely never seen the...
Why a Creepy Lifelike Baby Doll Saved My Sanity With Sibling Prep
I was sitting on my incredibly stained West Elm rug at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, wearing maternity leggings that definitely had dried yogurt on the left thigh, watching my three-year-old son Leo attempt a WWE-style suplex on...
The Baby Beluga Musician Was Right About Everything All Along
The radiator in our Chicago apartment was making that rhythmic clicking sound it only makes at three in the morning. My toddler was executing a flawless, rigid back-arch scream, the kind that usually shows either a dropped pacifier or a...
Why We Need To Talk About The Nepo Baby Meaning In Parenting
Dear Priya from six months ago. You're currently sitting on the living room floor at two in the morning with three laptops open. You're hitting refresh on the Lincoln Park cooperative preschool waitlist portal. You think if you just email...
Debugging the baby shark phase: Viral videos and double teeth
Don't ever assume an algorithm knows how to soothe your kid better than you do. I learned this the hard way at a coffee shop on Hawthorne last Tuesday, thinking a quick blast of YouTube would act as a temporary...
The Big Myth About Childrens Stacking Blocks
I'm currently sitting on the floor of my living room, nursing a bruised heel because I just stepped on a rogue wooden square while carrying a laundry basket the size of a small car. My youngest, who's nine months old,...
Spielzeug Kinder 2 Jahre: Surviving the Toddler Toy Explosion
I was standing in the dark hallway at 3 AM holding a laundry basket full of spit-up stained onesies when my heel came straight down on a plastic light-up police car that screamed "WEE-WOO PUT YOUR HANDS UP" into the...