I’m working on two books at the moment: Kurinji, a young-adult novel set at a boarding school in the mountains of South India; and Sari Swinging: One Mom Opts out of the American Work-Family Grind, a parenting memoir about raising my son for the first two years of his life in India. 

The New York Times will soon be publishing an essay excerpted from the memoir. It’s about a sleep machine my husband, Tim, and I rigged up for our son, Liam, back when he was an infant in India. For the first three months of his life, Liam had colic and the only way we could get him to sleep was on one of our chests with an adult thumb plugging his mouth. When the colicky crying finally ended, we should have sleep trained Liam, but instead we dug ourselves into progressively deeper holes, eventually building Liam a sleep machine out of pulleys, an ax handle, an old sari, and a spring.

Apologies for the poor video quality–it was 2010 and we were poor graduate students with a cheap camera. Regardless the video will give you a sense of what we were up to: no good, at least on the firm parenting front, though, boy, did we ever look smug. I’ll share the essay when it publishes.