Adam Kuban: Kublog

My Breezer Village on the Hudson.

It was totally my fault. All my dumbass fault. For years I’d been locking my bike right, with a series of heavy-duty primary and secondary locks. But then my big-ass honkin’ padlock rusted. Once I finally got it opened, I couldn’t get it closed again. I put a rinky-dink lock on it, “just until I get a new big-ass padlock,” I thought.

I waited too long. I should have gone lock-shopping the next day. Instead I waited a week, in which time some assholes came through our apartment complex and stole a number of bikes, my beloved Breezer Villager among them. Read the rest of this entry »

Who holds the record for fastest diaper change? Not me, to be sure, though I have gotten pretty good at swapping out shit britches over the last four weeks. It takes me less than a minute now for cloth diapers—and less than that if I’m putting The Bean in disposables (no diaper cover to worry about).

That’s still not as fast as the various procedures above. But they have nothing on this guy:

After reading and hearing some things that cautioned against putting newborns in BabyBjorn carriers (it’s supposedly bad for their hips), I decided to try out the Moby Wrap that my wife has been using to carry The Bean around the neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »

From peopleinpizzaslicecostumesbecomingpizzas.com.

Some of you may know me as the founder of Slice, the long-running weblog dedicated to pizza, which is now a part of Serious Eats. One thing I’ve learned over the years of pizzablogging (yes, Margot, pizzablogging is a thing, a weird, weird thing) is that everyone has his or her own way to make pizza and everyone’s way is THE RIGHT WAY. That is to say, if you don’t mix a dough, stretch it out, top it, or bake it the way John Q. Pizzanerd does it, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Variables like bake times, dough hydration, and seemingly innocuous things like whether you put sugar in your tomato sauce spark fierce debate.

My wife and I observed something similar in babyland when we were in the hospital shortly after Margot’s birth. Especially around issues of breastfeeding. Read the rest of this entry »

Margot, shortly before waking up.

“Is she sleeping through the night yet?” You’ve probably overheard that phrase if you’ve ever been around a group of newish parents.

I’d heard it before but never quite grasped the meaning. I just assumed that babies were finicky and that, sure, they’d wake you up here and there, but some nights they’d sleep for hours and hours (just not the whole night) and that other nights they’d sleep a little less. You know, that it was just sort of luck of the draw from night to night. And then eventually they’d sleep through the night and let you get eight hours.

Nope.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or, ‘Life lessons’

DON’T ask a woman if she’s pregnant. Ever. If you remember this, you can never go wrong.

But what if it’s obvious, you say? If it’s obvious, THEN YOU DON’T HAVE TO ASK.

Guess who in our family has violated this rule? Not me! That would be my wife. WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER. And she did it while she was pregnant, to a coworker who was NOT. Read the rest of this entry »

Walking around with a naked baby is like playing with a loaded gun.

Margot napping in her stroller.

Note: It looks like a lot of people are finding this post through Google searches for “strollers for walk-up apartments.” Here’s the TL;DR for you: I didn’t test all the strollers mentioned below. Just checked them out in-store and feature-comparisoned them via spreadsheet. We wanted a full-feature stroller that my wife could still lug up and down stairs. We narrowed it down to the Baby Jogger City Mini and the Bugaboo Bee. We would have gone with the City Mini (best value, universally stellar reviews) but some friends gave us their old Bugaboo Bee.

The one baby item I spent the most time researching was the stroller. I think it’s a guy thing (even though I’m usually loath to trot out mindless gender-normative stereotypes). If it involves gear—especially if that gear involves wheels—then guys are there, crunching numbers, analyzing minutiae, planning how they’re going to trick it out.

My wife and I (and now Margot) live on the third floor of a walk-up building in Queens. We don’t have a doorman. We don’t have space in the lobby to park a stroller. So we HAVE to carry it up and down when we want to use it. And that’s the real reason I tell myself I spent hours watching stroller demo videos on YouTube (where I learned that the fold is the money shot of stroller-review videos). Read the rest of this entry »

Margot Ming, just minutes old.

Hello, world, meet Margot Ming!

In computing, a hello world program is a small program often used as a test to verify that a computer’s programming is properly configured.

The phrase often shows up on blogging platforms, like the one I’m using for Kubaby, it’s often the default sample post that’s already published when you start a new blog. I usually delete that post, but here, it seemed fitting, so I kept it and modified the contents.

Margot Ming Lui Kuban was born on Tuesday, July 24, 2012, weighing 8 pounds, 3 ounces. She is our first child. I started this blog to share photos of our little bean with her grandparents.

Grimaldi’s, on an expansion jag as of late, has opened a branch in Coney Island. For the longest time I’ve thought the one under the Brooklyn Bridge was a tourist trap, but a recent visit to its new digs and a visit to the Coney outpost have me reconsidering. The last few times I’ve had [...] Read more on Famous Original A’s »