My sister Taylor came to visit when I was pregnant with Mouse. She brought a t-shirt that said “Cousins Make the Best Friends.” I didn’t get it for about 17 seconds. And then started crying uncontrollably. Hormones.
My nephew (we’ll call him Bear) was born about six months after Mouse. Which meant I was a phase or two ahead of her. She’d text a question (sleep, spit up, cold hands) and I’d just been through it. So I’d send an answer in blue-bubble-novel form. Eventually the novels outgrew the bubbles, so I started writing them as notes instead. It became a folder. Sleep schedules, gear options, breast pump logistics, poop topics galore. She could read it at 2am or whenever.
Then Taylor shared the notes with a pregnant friend. Then I shared them with mine. There was one harrowing experience when we thought a friend deleted the whole thing, but it turns out she just accidentally moved it when sending it to a whole other group of people. I stopped writing for a while (2 littles is all-consuming) but then on a trip with friends recently, someone brought up the Apple Notes folder and asked me to add more content. Someone else said I should write a book. I am not going to write a book. That sounds like #work.
But I did want a project. I’m the kind of person who learns by doing, not by taking a class, and I had tools I wanted to learn how to use (Claude Cowork built this whole Ghost site and design theme). The raw material was already sitting in a folder. I just had to give it structure.
This is why there’s posts dated back to 2023 even though this site just launched. That’s the OG “Baby Advice” folder stuff, reworked and dated to roughly when I originally wrote it. Turns out that’s harder than you’d think when your only evidence is vague references to the ages of your children. If a date is off by a month, that’s why.
Meet Cleo and Mouse — how we talk about our kids on this blog.