Magazine

A frustrated dad looking at his phone at 3 AM trying to decipher baby gear search terms.

Searching for the Teen Baby GT: A Letter to My Clueless Past Self

The screen brightness on my phone is currently burning a hole through my retinas at 3:14 AM. The nursery thermostat reads exactly 68.4 degrees, which Sarah insists is the good temperature for infant sleep, though the small human currently vibrating...

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A tired British dad looking deeply concerned while his baby cheerfully chews on a silicone toy

Why That Horrifying Teeth Grinding Sound Your Baby Makes Is Fine

It was exactly 2:14 in the morning when I first heard it. A rhythmic, grating sound cutting through the otherwise silent nursery, like someone slowly crushing chalk with a mortar and pestle, or perhaps a tiny, furious geologist trying to...

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Tired mom holding a newborn baby wrapped in a soft organic cotton swaddle

Surviving Newborn Sleep and Marriage Without Losing Your Mind

My mother-in-law was standing in my kitchen holding a frozen cabbage leaf, telling me to just put the baby in a laundry basket in the closet if he wouldn't stop crying. My best friend, who lives in a totally different...

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Tired father looking suspiciously at a padded baby nest on the living room floor.

The Great Padded Donut Deception: A Father's Baby Nest Confession

I was standing in the middle of our cramped London flat at 3:17 a.m., holding what looked like an oversized, over-engineered dog bed, desperately trying to remember which twin I had just fed. Maya was wailing from the Moses basket,...

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A messy toddler eating shredded pork from a suction plate at a family barbecue

Surviving the Chaos of Smoking Baby Back Ribs With Toddlers

It was 4:13 PM on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and I was wearing my absolute favorite, completely impractical white linen top from Zara. I don't know why I wore white. It was an act of extreme hubris. My husband,...

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Jess folding organic cotton Linxia baby clothes on a messy living room couch

Raising A Linxia Baby: The Unfiltered Truth About Newborn Life

I was standing in the Target baby aisle at 9 PM on a Tuesday, completely dead inside, while my oldest son Jackson screamed against my chest in a carrier that I was probably wearing wrong. He was three weeks old....

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A pile of white cloth diaper inserts next to a bathtub

The ugly truth about deep cleaning your reusable cloth diapers

I was standing over the changing table last November, the Chicago wind rattling the windowpanes, pulling a supposedly fresh cloth diaper off my toddler. It smelled exactly like the gerbil enclosure at a rundown pet store. I had washed that...

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A tired dad staring confused at an ultrasound printout on his desk

When Can You Tell the Gender of a Baby? A Dad's Data Timeline

I was sitting in my ergonomic office chair, hitting CMD+R on my Gmail inbox every forty seconds like I was waiting for a server deployment to finish. We were at week ten of the pregnancy. Somewhere in the cloud, a...

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A translucent baby scorpion next to an infant crib leg.

Debugging the Desert: Surviving a Baby Scorpion in the Nursery

It was 2:14 AM in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was scanning the baseboards of our Airbnb with a blacklight flashlight I had overnighted from Amazon, looking for what I can only describe as a hardware glitch in nature. My 11-month-old...

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