The Great Formula Panics: What I Learned About Feeding My Kid
It was 4:12 AM, I was holding a screaming, thrashing newborn, and my laptop screen was glowing in the dark with a massive spreadsheet titled Formula_Matrix_v4_FINAL.xlsx. My wife walked into the kitchen, looked at the screen, looked at my bloodshot...
The Baby Platypus Taught Me More About Parenting Than Books
When it came time to figure out how we were going to explain the birds and the beesβor just basic mammalian biologyβto our kid, I got three entirely different pieces of advice within a 24-hour window. My mother-in-law told me...
Decoding baby names for boys: A dad's naming algorithm
Line 74 of my Google Sheet was flashing neon green. I'd written a custom script to highlight any moniker with a standard deviation of less than 5% in popularity over the last decade, filtering out anything that spiked due to...
The Theater Beta Test: Bringing an 11-Month-Old to the Movies
I was standing under the dripping marquee of the Hollywood Theatre here in Portland, staring at the decibel meter app on my Apple Watch while my 11-month-old daughter Maya actively tried to chew off the zipper of my rain jacket....
A Letter To Past Tom About Hanging Baby Mobiles
Dear Tom of six months ago. You're currently standing in your socks on a wobbly Ikea step stool at 2:13 AM. You have a plastic, battery-guzzling, brightly coloured spaceship contraption in one hand and a tiny screwdriver clamped between your...
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...
Why Baby Face Nelson Has Nothing on My Toddler
It's 4:17 in the morning, and the glowing screen of my phone is illuminating half of my face while the other half is being rhythmically kicked by a two-year-old foot. I'm frantically trying to Google why one of my twin...
Why Adding a Baby Duck to Our Family Was a Terribly Stupid Idea
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday. The baby monitor was flashing that menacing yellow warning color, indicating my son was tossing around again. I was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, scrolling through a local...
The real baby driver 2: A letter to my past self about car seat panic
Dear Marcus from six months ago, You're currently idling in the driveway of the Hawthorne Fred Meyer in your Subaru. The engine is running. The heater is set exactly to 70 degrees because you read somewhere that anything else will...