David Minerva Clover

People might raise their eyebrows when they hear me say “snowperson” for the first time. But it makes perfect sense. A man is just a kind of person.

To knowingly include stories with deeply problematic themes strikes me as just adding fuel to the fire.

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.

I think kids and parents need old school trick-or-treating. I think it has a value far greater than the sum of its candy. I love trick-or-treating!

The whole concept of salaries for stay-at-home moms reveals both the classism in parenting culture and what we really think about poor people.

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.

It was like how you might feel if you thought you were the only person who liked apples. Maybe everyone else just thought apples were for decoration, but you liked to eat them. And then one day you found someone else who also ate apples, and you got really excited about that! And then suddenly, it hit you… What if everybody secretly ate and enjoyed apples, only we were all too afraid to mention it?

Despite our relative insulation from homophobia, my wife and I are not unaware of the situation. There are plenty of people in this country who don’t believe that we have the right to exist, to be married, or to raise a child together.

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.”