David Minerva Clover

Back when we decided to have a baby together, we had a plan. She was never, ever going to have to work full-time. She was going to work part-time, and I was going to work part-time, selling dog food at that cute little store I used to work at. We would have one day off a week in common, and we would be broke, but we would get by. We would be tired, but we would be happy.

Babies, while awesome in so many wonderful ways, do not give a single shit if you really need another hour of sleep. If the baby is up, you’re up. So we were up.

Yes, we should be criticizing these straight, cisgender dads. We’ve been far too easy on them for too long. It’s straight out of the patriarchy playbook.

Get creative! There's a wide range of passive-aggressive, and aggressive-aggressive, comments you can make as you hand over the dough. Whatever you choose, remember that your goal is make them wonder if having their electricity shut off is actually any worse than having this conversation with you.

We’re trying to raise him with a lot of options and very few assumptions, but I won’t be mad at you if you call my kid “handsome little boy” or something. It’s fine. People have a hard time talking about babies without gendered labels. Even I have a hard time with it, and I’ve put a kind of ridiculous amount of energy into analyzing this stuff.

However, I do have one favor to ask. Please, for the love of everything that is good in this world, stop calling him “little man.”

Although the hunt for the perfect outfit at the thrift store was a thrill when I was thin, as a fat person, the hunt was just downright depressing.

There’s just no getting around it, and other than one half-hour spell where he sat with a good friend of ours while both of his moms took a swim, one of us had to be with him the entire weekend. And let’s be honest, because I’m “boob mom” and he was nursing even more than normal, it could never really be divided 50/50. All of that was fine, but it was often just fine, and there’s just no denying that it was a very different trip than it would have been without a kid.

For those of you just tuning in, my wifespouse wanted to go to this weirdo punk festival in the middle of nowhere, and I, a chronic pessimist, decided it would be a good idea to go as a family. That means me, her, our 1-year-old child, and one incredibly intense weekend.

Here are six tips that can serve as a basic outline of how most parents can strategize to help feed a toddler and to calm the heck down.

None of us follows any one parenting philosophy to a T; we’re all making split-second decisions about what is and isn’t dangerous.