A week before their trip to Korea, my wife is stressed and the baby is sleeping poorly. Falling asleep after midnight. Waking at 3 in the morning and wanting to play. Holding her arms and legs and saying she is hurt, apa. It is almost the word for father, appa. It sounds the same. Grace is 18 [...]

And then someone goes and shoots up an elementary school, and the details that come out are more and more horrific. Suddenly, trying to write about your own small fears seems misplaced. Public fear, collective fear, dominates the news. It dominates Twitter. It dominates parenting. Cathreen is taking our daughter to Korea in the middle [...]

It happens on Twitter, as most things these days. I tweet that we have nowhere to go on turkey day, and a writer friend invites us to her house, baby and all. I check several times to make sure this is okay with her family. Grace eats like, well, a baby. Watching this process can [...]

We have been bogged down in baby stuff for months. Odd for a child whose birth forced us to reschedule the baby shower. (She’s been antisocial, we sometimes joke, from that moment on.) Baby stuff. At first, you have a few set things, the things people tell you you need: a place for the baby [...]

  The rice in America, reports the latest news, is soaking up arsenic from the old cotton fields it is grown in. Or at least this is what my wife says. She says we can’t eat rice anymore. “What kind of Koreans don’t eat rice?” I ask. I don’t know if this is something I [...]

Because my baby forgot me, I take her out for three days in a row, to bond. My wife is having headaches. She has a line of itchy bumps across her waist that she thinks are bed bug bites. I try to assure her we do not have bed bugs, but I have been away, [...]

We are going to a wedding in New Hampshire, my wife and I and the baby. It happens to be plus-90 outside and a three-hour drive, but we are going. This is one of my last good friends from undergrad, and we haven’t seen her in almost a year. We have rented the Zipcar. We [...]

We have planned two parties for the weekend, to celebrate Grace’s first birthday, her 돌. 돌 is like an American’s 18th and 21st birthdays all at once, at least in that it is the birthday that matters most to her future, the birthday that means she will have a future. I have learned that there was [...]

We are just beginning to find out how when your baby gets sick, you get sick. Before, this was always a metaphor. Now it is a cycle of fever and sore throats and utter exhaustion. One that will go on for years and years. Somehow, babies do not become adults overnight. Though this is a [...]

I go to New York for a reading and leave my wife and the baby at home for the third time in Grace’s 10 months of life. When I get back, my baby who is afraid of other babies touching her has kissed a boy. Her first kiss. My wife says she will never forget [...]

Once upon a time, my column was about relationships. It was sexy, or at least sexier. It went places, saw people, attended events. Now—I have faced the fact—it is about a baby. It is about a 10-month-old named Grace who doesn’t sleep well, most of the time, who is pretty in pink and loves to eat and [...]

I have been trying to teach my daughter to wave. I say goodbye, wave, step out of the room; I step back in, say hello, wave. This is because a friend’s baby kept waving at me and I got jealous. I think Grace doesn’t wave because we never leave her. My wife is always with [...]

1. I want to write, the following numbers are not typos. For a week, my daughter stays up all night and goes to bed at 6 AM, at 8 AM, at 10 AM—the record. My wife texts this time to me while I am sitting at my desk, at work. Finally she went to bed, [...]