Real Advice on How to Stop Baby Hiccups Without Losing Your Mind
"Put a wet piece of thread on his forehead," my mother-in-law instructed over FaceTime, holding her phone entirely too close to her face. My neighbor, who means well but reads too many mommy blogs, told me later that afternoon to...
Why That Baby Star They Regret Losing Drama Wrecked My Sleep
The blue light from my cracked iPhone screen was violently illuminating the dried spit-up on my shoulder, and the microwave clock in the kitchen read exactly 3:14 AM. I was pinned under an eighteen-pound milk-drunk four-month-old, my legs were entirely...
Why I Stopped Talking to My Infant Like a Tiny Corporate Executive
There's this very specific, slightly yellowish stain on the left shoulder of my vintage Ramones t-shirt. I got the shirt at a thrift store in 2018, back when I had things like "free time" and "disposable income," but the stain...
Why Gladys the Cincinnati Zoo Gorilla Is My New Parenting Hero
It was 6:14 AM on a Tuesday, I was wearing my husband Mark’s college lacrosse hoodie that smells faintly of old garlic, and I was staring at a gorilla on my phone while my coffee went completely cold. Like, literally...
What the Gisele Bundchen Baby News Taught Me About Over-40 Pregnancy
It was a Tuesday, I was wearing yoga pants with an unidentifiable yogurt stain on the left knee, standing in the aisle at Target staring blankly at diaper cream when three different people gave me completely contradicting advice about having...
The real story on the frida baby bath tub and the daily wash myth
I was standing in my cramped Chicago bathroom at eight in the evening with a slippery, shrieking newborn who looked exactly like a wet baby bat. My mother-in-law was on FaceTime, loudly explaining that he needed this nightly ritual to...
What nobody tells you about that first postpartum menstrual cycle
Listen, the biggest lie anyone will ever tell you in those hazy early days is that nursing your baby is a foolproof way to pause your menstrual cycle for a year. I was sitting on my toilet in our cramped...
The Truth About The Perfectly Put-Together Infant
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was wearing a maternity bra that hadn't been genuinely white since the Obama administration. My second kid, Maya, was exactly three weeks old and smack in the middle of a cluster-feeding...
The 2 AM Google Spiral About Baby Milestones
It was 2:14 in the morning on a Tuesday. Or maybe Wednesday? Time doesn't actually exist when you've an eleven-month-old who treats sleep like a hostile negotiation. I was sitting on the floor of Maya's nursery, wearing Dave's grey zip-up...