Waiting For The First Real Smile Without Losing Your Mind
It was three in the morning during a brutal Chicago February, and the radiator in our apartment was making that rhythmic hissing sound. I was holding my son after a feed, staring at his squished face in the dim light...
The "Baby Daddy" Firmware Update: What I Actually Know Now
3:14 AM. I'm standing in our kitchen illuminated only by the microwave clock, holding a lukewarm bottle of formula, and staring at a Google Sheet I built to track our son's diaper output. The rows are color-coded by consistency. My...
Debugging the erratic hardware of your newborn's respiratory system
My mother-in-law confidently told me that if the nursery is completely quiet, the baby is sleeping perfectly and I should go make a sandwich. My lead developer at work, however, told me that I needed to purchase a hospital-grade under-mattress...
"I had a baby without you": The messy truth of solo parenting
The biggest myth about doing this alone is that it looks absolutely anything like the cinema. People type i had a baby without you full movie into their search bars late at night, expecting some sweeping romantic drama starring an...
The Baby John Phenomenon: Decoding Screen Time & Newborn Life
"Just put on that little animated kid, it's basically a mute button for crying," my lead engineer told me over Slack while I bounced a screaming infant on my knee. "If he looks at a screen before he's two, his...
What I Got Completely Wrong About My First Baby Bouncer Seat
It was a Tuesday at like, 2 PM, and I was sitting on the damp bath mat in my tiny apartment bathroom, wearing a stained gray nursing bra and exactly one sock. Leo was three and a half weeks old....
What I Wish I Knew Before Buying That Magical Baby Swing
Itβs 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in November, and I'm standing in my kitchen wearing a pair of Target maternity leggings from 2014 that smell aggressively like sour milk, holding a lukewarm mug of yesterdayβs coffee, just absolutely paralyzed while...
The brutal truth about picking baby names that won't ruin them
My mother-in-law cornered me in the kitchen at twenty weeks pregnant to gently suggest that our child's name needed to reflect our deep ancestral roots. Later that afternoon, my hipster neighbor in Logan Square casually mentioned over the fence that...