What Bess Kalb’s Kids Can’t Live Without

When I cook, my style is “comfort shtetl peasant.” I am proud to say I have two comfort shtetl children who enjoy my easy slop lunches. And these Bentgo bento boxes really make my “nut butter cut into triangles” routine look professional. The first one I got wasa BPA-free-plastic versionthat was much more openable, but it just got impregnated with dish-soap smell and taste. And I am not a scientist, but I feel like metal is better for them. It’s sort of a fool’s errand to try tolimit a child’s exposure to plasticin 2026, but at least the bento box is controllable.

My kids each have their own Micro Kickboardscooter. It’s basically the law to have one of these in Brooklyn, so we didn’t have much choice in the type of scooter we got. But it was also the kind of thing that was like,Well, if it’s good enough for every single person around us, we’re not gonna break the bolts.The 6-year-old now hasa slightly bigger one with light-up wheels, and the 3-year-old inherited his older brother’ssmaller scooter, which we sold to him as, like, “This one has gone all over Brooklyn.”

What the scooter does is eliminate the need for astrollerwhile solving the problem that oftentimes a perfectly able-bodied, fed, well-rested toddler is incapable of walking. To my Outdoor Wilderness trip-leader husband’s dismay, my children take after their mother in that they wilt at the slightest inconvenience and cannot be bothered to walk anywhere unless it involves a significant treat; in their case, the treat is the promise of their cousins, their grandpa, a hot chocolate, or any museum. The Micro Kickboards turned that around and now they scoot through Brooklyn like little circus bears for any reason. They have gleefully scooted to the pediatricianknowingthey would be getting vaccines — also can’t live without! — just because scooting is fun.

We all have sort of a bumpy upper arm in my family. And we all get a little patch of eczema that arrives in the winter somewhere different every year. It’s very exciting. We should all see an expert about it someday, but in the meantime, Weleda Skin Food is great. I quoted Jenna Maroney from30 Rocksaying “Me want food” once when I put the Skin Food on my baby’s arms, and he thought it was extremely funny, so now we do “Me want food” and put it on their littlepulkiesand arms after bathtime at night. Is it making their eczema better? Sort of. Do they laugh and laugh about a joke from a TV show they’ve never seen? Yes. And that is why I recommend it. (I also put it on my face and swear by it.)

Parenting is marketing. Seventy times a day, I am Don Draper pitching “putting on a hat” or “peeing before we leave the house” or “getting in the bath” to an ice-cold client. Selling a child on vegetables the year he tried a cupcake became a losing battle, and I read all (two of) the books and saved Instagram diagrams and consulted group chats, but ultimately the only thing that worked was to make trying new things a fun activity. Not because of anything I did or said or cultivated but because of a cheap plastic thing I bought. They’ve eatenactualBrussels sprouts with these shark chopsticks. Why? Because it’s a shark. Thecrocodile versionwas not as successful.

The only reason my children have normal bloodwork is because of what I put into their smoothies and then freeze into shark-shaped Popsicles. They’re so cold they can’t taste it, and I put sprinkles in the tips of the nose so they look like something from Mister Softee. I realize when I am making these that I’m not operating from a place of trust. But Iamcoming from a place of love, and I apologize that there are so many vegetables in these Popsicles.

We used to have little round Popsicle molds from the baby days. But they would go through the them too quickly. So I looked for bigger molds, and when I saw a shark I was like,Wow! I don’t even have to read a review. You’re speaking my kids’ culinary language here.My smoothie recipe is a ton of Greek yogurt, bananas, blueberries, strawberries, peanut butter, sometimes almond butter, a little bit of honey, milk, kale, spinach, and silken tofu. Referring to them as a treat is key. I will say something like, “You finished your breakfast, should we have breakfast dessert?” And they’re just eating a full serving of spinach and licking their lips.

We had our first child in quarantine during the pandemic, so he was never really exposed to other children and became a sort of sophisticated adult baby. My dad was his nanny, and he actually had a lot of the same affectations as a 67-year-old Jewish man and would just kind of shrug if he dropped something. So we never ended up needing tobabyproofthe house for him. We were like,Oh, we’re just such good parents. Then we had a second child.

The baby’s sense of locomotion and the world was all based on his toddler brother. The person he was closest to and exposed to most was this rambunctious thing teetering around the house. As a result, he bonked around more than the first one did. So he needed protection, and these corner guards saved the day — it was like the difference between needing an ice pack and needing urgent care. They’re not giant foam things. The furniture doesn’t really look much different with them on it. It just has these little clear nodules on the corners and everyone’s alive, which I think is a pretty good trade-off.

I truly have nothing in common with people who buy expensive baby socks. These socks are from Target and have lasted multiple children multiple years. They are thin so they don’t bunch up in a shoe, which is crucial. They are cheap, all the same color, and have grippers on the bottom so if you take off a shoe and run to get a snack, you’re not going to be destroyed. They’re like a built-in safety mechanism. If you lose one, it’s not the end of $15 and you live another day. You all get to live another day.

Our friends who were very together were like, “Oh, you, you have two different baby monitors for your two kids, how medieval of you.” Then with a flick of a thumb, they had both cribs in high definition on their phones, and they don’t need to worry about the charge or being out of range. So we were like,This Black Friday we’re gonna drop a cool $200 on something that is fully redundant and might make our lives worse. And it did, but we now can’t live without it because now we can have both kids onscreen without juggling multiple contraptions.

It has definitely made life more efficient, but it has also interrupted the line between having the baby monitor and not having the baby monitor because I always have my phone. It presents this constant temptation to check in. And my husband has had to endure date nights with me at a movie turning on my phone screen to check the monitor. I was not a parent who ever had the sock breathing monitor — sometimes the more information you have, the worse. And this does feel dangerously close to that, but at least it’s efficient. They sleep in two different rooms and we have two cameras, but there’s no physical monitor needed. It’s just an app on a phone.

My parents lived on the Upper West Side until very recently when they moved to Brooklyn to be closer to my children. The best thing about going up there and visiting them was that I could re-up my stash of ground Zabar’s Blend Zabar’s coffee. My cousin Zoe gave us a beautiful bean grinder, but as an exhausted parent, using this fancy grinder and pressing the button and unloading the thing and pouring it in are honestly sometimes the prohibitive steps between being caffeinated and not being caffeinated. So getting the coffee pre-ground became a thing for me pretty early into becoming a parent.

I have also bought Zabar’s Blend whole-bean coffee and ground it at home, but you don’t get the same taste. It’s not just a convenience thing. I genuinely believe it is the best cup of coffee money can buy. But I do feel this is the equivalent of a Boston person telling you Dunkin’ is the best coffee. Now that my parents have moved to Brooklyn, any time I have a doctor’s appointment in Manhattan, I’ll go up to Zabar’s and get the pre-ground beans and come back with a tote bag full of coffee. There’s gotta be an olfactory element to this and the nostalgia of going into the store and smelling it as they grind it and being among Upper West Siders. I even went to high school with one of the Zabar’s heirs, and probably the biggest regret of my life is that I didn’t marry him. I didn’t know him very well; we might have spoken twice, and of course I wouldn’t have the beautiful family I have now, but I would be rolling in that coffee.

I know Lindy, the founder of Lindquist, and my friend Kat Cummings works there. So I’d been seeing Lindquist bags for years and eventually bought the cross-body satchel thing at my friend Mary McGill’s store on Block Island. It has changed my life in that I used to carry around giant tote bags full of wipes and snacks and water bottles and granola bars and, you know, extra pairs of socks and pants, and I could never find my phone or keys or wallet. But now I have my phone and my credit card and my keys strapped to my chest.

My son’s memory of his mother was going to just be me constantly rifling through a tote bag, trying not to curse. But instead, I’m this sort of chic Brooklynite with her accessible phone and this well-made leather good. I could probably do the same thing with a Ziploc bag on a bungee cord attached to me. But I feel good about myself when I have this, and it’s indestructible. There should be a steady stream of moms going into their shop in Brooklyn like, “Hi, do you have the thing to not make me humiliate myself in front of my children or other mothers at the park?”

I wroteBuffalo Fluffalowhen my oldest was 18 months old, and around three years later I wroteBuffalo Fluffalo and Puffalo. I had gone away for the weekend to a sort of writers’ retreat. It was the first time I was away from my youngest. I wrote it while really, really missing him and pumping; he must have been about a year old at that point. What ended up happening was I wrote a love story between two siblings, and it’s the most important love story in my life because I watch it every day. But also I’m the oldest child in my family. I have a little brother. When I was pregnant with my youngest, I got all these books that were like,You’re gonna love the baby. You’re gonna help Mama with the baby. And I remember that for me as a kid, that was not the case.

You know, when you get a new sibling, your parents are all of a sudden very distracted and you’re not the focus anymore. It can be really hard. Also a baby is hard to play with. You can feel really helpless. So I wanted a book that felt accurate to the new-baby experience specifically, which is what it’s about. But I’ve read it to all these schoolkids now and they’re like, “This is like me when I moved. I hated it. And now I like it.” Kids go through the wildest changes and all of the adults in their lives are telling them it’s great. It’s gonna be great. But at first, it’s really hard.