I thought about starting a baby blog for about a minute. OK — I actually did start one and then neglect it. I finally just folded all of those posts into Kublog.
“Change her diaper and I’ll feed her in The Chair.” <-- That's my wife in the morning. "The Chair" being the glider in The Bean's nursery. In the morning she has to make the distinction about nursing location, since she often feeds the baby in a side-lying hold in our bed. I know the day has begun in earnest when my wife takes The Chair. Continue reading “‘The Chair’”
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. That’s still not as fast as the various procedures above. But they have nothing on this guy. Continue reading Who holds the record for fastest diaper change?
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. Continue reading “How raising a baby is like making pizza”
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. Continue reading “Things I learned during my wife’s pregnancy”
UPDATE: This post gets a lot of traffic via search, and I wanted to update this after nearly 2 years with our first child. IMO, the best stroller for a NYC walk-up apartment IS A CARRIER—until your baby is old enough to ride in a lightweight umbrella stroller. That is just my opinion. Seriously, if you don’t have an elevator, it is a pain carrying anything larger than an umbrella stroller up and down the stairs, especially if you’re doing it with a baby in tow. In which case, you should probably be putting the baby in a carrier or sling anyway, so you don’t drop him/her. —2014-05-26
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). Continue reading “Best strollers for NYC walk-up apartments”