Attention, sleep, emotional and social growth, motor skills, and the science of how children actually develop.
Lucy Bamboo · August 6, 2026
She slept through the smoke alarm test. Not our alarm — the neighbors’, two units down, audible through two walls and a hallway. I was in her doorway, heart in my throat, and she didn’t move. The white noise machine hummed from her dresser, doing exactly what it was supposed to do, and I stood … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 10, 2026
It’s 5:30. There’s an onion half-chopped, and the Paw Patrol theme song coming from the next room. My daughter is parked in front of it, three feet from the stove, and for the next thirty minutes I am going to get dinner made. I’ve written to you about wooden bears and muddy creeks. I’ve told … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 8, 2026
A sound machine arrived with the diaper bag from a friend from the prenatal group. It was already set to what I can only describe as active tarmac. I left it on for a week before I started wondering what, exactly, I had plugged in six inches from her head. She’s two now, and we … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 6, 2026
We were at Pho King Good, the Vietnamese restaurant where my daughter has eaten since she was four months old, strapped to me in a carrier. She’s two now — right in the middle of the most intense phase of toddler motor development she will ever experience. That night, she reached across the table for … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 5, 2026
She was at the top of a boulder at the edge of the playground — not a big-for-a-toddler pebble, a real one, taller than she is and then some, with a flat top she’d hauled herself onto using footholds she’d worked out on her own. I could see her knees shaking from a few feet … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 3, 2026
There is a carved bear in a mountain town we pass through, taller than I am, sitting forward on its haunches with its front paws curled like armrests. It’s carved from a single trunk, stained a deep amber-brown, flanked by a pair of carved birch trees so the whole thing reads as a forest scene, … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 2, 2026
I went in to check on her and found her like this: face completely down, head buried so deep into the mattress I could not see a single feature, legs sticking entirely out from under the blanket, bare feet catching the faint light from the hallway. The cartoon animal blanket — the one with the … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 1, 2026
There’s a creek at Oak Creek, at the Red Rock Crossing in Sedona, Arizona, shallow and slow, with a soft muddy bank where the water goes still. Last April I took my daughter there on a whim, the day too good to stay inside, and within about ninety seconds she had lowered herself straight down … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 30, 2026
Seventeen. That’s the number I kept landing on when I went down a full rabbit hole about how toddlers learn to walk one night after my youngest had what felt like her four hundredth tumble before lunch. Seventeen falls per hour. And that’s not the number for a kid who is struggling, or tired, or … Read more
