Magazine

Dad holding phone to take baby pictures of an eleven month old

Why My Phone is Full of Blurry Baby Pictures (And What to Do)

My iCloud storage officially threw a fatal error at 2:14 AM on a Tuesday. I was standing in the pitch black of the nursery, balancing my eleven-month-old son’s disproportionately heavy head against my collarbone, while frantically trying to delete cached...

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A dad looking at a laptop screen next to a sleeping baby

Why I Let a Baby Name Generator Pick My Kid's Name

I was staring at a shared Google Sheet at two in the morning when I realized our entire naming protocol was fundamentally broken. My mother had just called to advise us to pick something "biblical but not weird," whatever that...

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Tired dad staring at his phone while a baby sleeps in a crib

The "Baby Jane" Effect: Surviving the Psychological Thriller of Par...

It's 3:14 AM, the nursery is exactly 69.4 degrees according to my three separate thermometers, and outside my window, the Portland rain sounds like static. I'm sitting cross-legged on the rug, barely breathing, watching the chest of my 11-month-old daughter...

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A dad looking at his phone in the dark nursery thinking about infant loss

Why the Kayla Vesia Baby News Broke My Brain as a New Dad

It was 3:17 AM. My 11-month-old was finally asleep, doing that weird starfish pose that aggressively takes up eighty percent of the crib real estate. The room smelled faintly of diaper cream and exhausted desperation. I was sitting on the...

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A dad looking exhausted while holding two newborn twins in blankets

The gloriously absurd reality of making a test tube baby in your 30s

"So," my Great-Aunt Maureen leaned in over a plate of increasingly stale buffet sandwiches at a family wedding, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Are they test tube babies?" I looked down at my twin girls, who were currently...

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A dad looking confused while his 11 month old baby yells at a rubber spatula

What Age Do Babies Start Talking? My Audio Troubleshooting Log

Yesterday, my mom texted me that I clearly said "tractor" at eight months old. This morning, the barista at our local Portland roastery informed me his daughter was speaking in full, complete sentences before her first birthday. Meanwhile, my Reddit...

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A tired dad staring at a tiny frosted glass bottle of baby cologne

A letter to myself about the absolute madness of baby cologne

Dear Tom of Six Months Ago, You're currently standing in the hallway of the semi-detached in Balham, holding a tiny, frosted glass bottle gifted by your remarkably chic European mother-in-law. You're staring at the words "Eau de Senteur" printed in...

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Exhausted dad trying to figure out a complicated fabric baby carrier

The absolute origami nightmare of strapping on a baby carrier

I was standing in the middle of our cramped London kitchen at two in the afternoon, sweating profusely, completely tangled in eighteen feet of modal fabric. One twin was screaming from the bouncy chair on the floor, the other was...

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A bewildered dad awkwardly testing bath water temperature with his elbow.

Debugging Bath Time: My Quest for a Safe Baby Bathtub

I’m standing over our stainless steel kitchen sink, my heart rate clocking 130 BPM on my smartwatch, holding what can only be described as a furiously squirming, soap-covered water balloon. My wife Sarah is standing exactly two feet to my...

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