"Baby Please" Go To Sleep: My Messy Fourth Trimester Survival Guide
My mother-in-law told me to put a scoop of rice cereal in the nighttime bottle at two weeks old so the baby would sleep. The hospital lactation consultant told me if I even looked at a silicone pacifier I'd ruin...
Dear Past Jess: The Brutal Truth About Raising A Baby Parrot
There's weird, lukewarm yellow formula cemented into my hair, the digital food thermometer is blinking an angry red 106 degrees at me, and I'm sitting on the cold linoleum of the laundry room floor at two in the morning desperately...
The 2 AM Snot Panic and the Alligator Wrestling Match
I was sitting in the rocking chair at two in the morning, holding my oldest kid when he was just three weeks old, and he sounded exactly like a forty-pound pug who had just run a marathon in the Texas...
The absolute exhaustion of finding truly unique baby names
The lady from medical records was tapping her pen against her clipboard, shifting her weight from one Dansko clog to the other. I was forty-eight hours postpartum, sweating through a hospital gown that smelled like iodine, holding the birth certificate...
The Real Deal on Baby Name Meanings Without Losing Your Mind
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, sweating through a maternity tank top in the middle of July, when the great naming summit occurred in my living room. My mom looked me dead in the eye and said I needed to pick...
Why I Let a Computer Name My Kids and Tossed the Giant Books
I was sitting on the floor of our half-painted nursery in the dead of a Texas July, sweating through my maternity leggings, when I aggressively hurled a 1,000-page naming dictionary across the room at my husband. It missed him, thankfully,...
The Truth About Finishing A Baby Memory Book Without Crying
I was sitting cross-legged on the nursery floor at two in the morning with a glue stick in one hand and a stack of blurry hospital photos in the other, absolutely sobbing because I couldn't remember the exact circumference of...
That time my seven-year-old demanded we get a baby leopard
It was Tuesday around 4:15 PM, raining, and I was wearing those grey sweatpants with the mysterious bleach stain on the left thigh. Maya, who's seven and currently in her aggressively vocal animal rights phase, dropped her neon pink backpack...
Are the Viral Sézane Paula Babies Actually Wearable for Real Moms?
It was Tuesday, 8:14 AM. I was standing in my kitchen wearing black leggings that definitely had yesterday's crusty oatmeal smeared across the left thigh, clutching my third cup of lukewarm coffee like it was a life raft. My husband...