The Schlupfmütze: Why This Bizarre Hat Defeats All Winter Gear
I'm standing in the middle of Mt. Tabor park, staring at a patch of mud, watching my eleven-month-old aggressively rip a perfectly good knit beanie off his head for the fourteenth time in ten minutes. He doesn't even look angry....
Decoding The Baby Mütze Winter: Thermal Dynamics And Myths
We were in the produce section at New Seasons when a woman holding a reusable canvas tote tapped my shoulder to inform me that my eleven-month-old daughter was going to catch meningitis because she wasn't wearing a hat. It was...
A Letter To My Freaking Out Past Self About Winter Baby Hats
Dear 2017 Sarah, You're currently standing in the hallway of the apartment, staring at the front door like it's a portal to hell. It's mid-November. Maya is exactly three weeks old. You're wearing those gray maternity leggings with the breastmilk...
Troubleshooting the August 24th Beanie Baby Birthday Tradition
My mother told me I had to find a plush toy with his exact birthdate printed on the tag because it's a sacred childhood tradition that builds character. My wife told me absolutely not to bring a dust-mite-infested nineties relic...
The Hunt for a December 10th Beanie Baby Birthday Twin
At 2:14 AM on a Tuesday, I found myself in a heated eBay bidding war with a user named PlushQueen99 over a stuffed zebra from 2003. My daughter was asleep in the next room, the baby monitor glowing on my...
Why The January 27th Beanie Baby Birthday Hunt Almost Broke Me
It was 2:14 in the morning, and the blue glow of my phone screen was the only thing illuminating the massive pile of laundry I'd been ignoring for three days. I was frantically refreshing a sketchy auction page, my thumb...
The weird truth about keeping your infant son warm this winter
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, standing in a freezing Chicago parking lot, violently arguing with my mother on speakerphone about wool. She was convinced my unborn beta would instantly freeze to death the moment we left the maternity ward unless...
My Strange Internet Rabbit Hole: The Beanie Baby Payhip Search
I was standing in the kitchen at 11:42 AM on a Tuesday, wearing my husband's college sweatpants that have a mysterious bleach stain on the left knee, holding a mug of coffee that had been microwaved three separate times since...
Debugging The Baby Beanie: My Thermal Miscalculations As A Dad
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, roughly two weeks after we brought our son home, and I was staring at the Nanit monitor on my nightstand like it was a mission-critical server dashboard. The camera feed showed my kid...