Movie Night!
Dancing Queens on Lookout Mountain (April 2023)
From “How I Met Your Mother,” Episode 4: A Look on Lookout Mountain
After dinner, everybody danced. Your mother, as you will have discovered, is a lovely dancer. When she first danced in my apartment, she was so smooth, her movements so complex yet precise, that I assumed they were choreographed. She had learned them while a competitive cheerleader for eight years, I figured, and liked to break them out now and then, or she had practiced her routines in front of a mirror at home.
This amused her: in fact, she was improvising her moves on the spot. On the patio I took a video of her dancing with her sister, Erin, and her mother, Froncé, to Abba’s “Dancing Queen”. You can hear my delighted laugh in the background.
Leah Discovers Braunwald (Sept. 2023)
From “How I Met Your Mother,” Episode 5: Paralyzed
And I thought: A few more months and it’s December. A year since we’d met. And in a few more months it would be March, a year since we started going steady. She had told me long before that a year should be enough time to know. In a few weeks, we would go to Europe, including to Germany, where she’d meet my mother’s last two surviving relatives, and then to Braunwald, Switzerland, the magical mountainside village I’d been fortunate to know and return to since I was a toddler. Braunwald would have been the ideal setting to propose.
Helmets into the breach, boys (2025)
In which Cameron explains every parent’s dream of making their kids totally safe, forever.
And it’s helmets.
Helmets at the start, helmets all the time.
Hummingbird Heartbeat (January 5, 2026)
The day before Leah’s due date, we hear that little heartbeat, revving up at 145bpm for her entry into the world.
One of the most extraordinary sounds a prospective parent can hear: a baby’s heartbeat on the monitor at the Ob-Gyn. This is Leah, about a week before our daughter Sophia was born on January 12, 2026.
Sophia’s heartbeat had been irregular throughout the pregnancy — a detail that would later become one of the reasons we transferred from our planned home birth to the hospital in the final hours of labor. But here, in this moment, it was just a hummingbird: fast, bright, impossibly alive.
Shaking the Baby Loose (January 6, 2026)
It’s hard work getting a baby to find its way, head down, into the birth canal. Sometimes you have to walk funny.
Five days before Sophia arrived, Leah was doing what overdue mothers do: anything and everything to get labor started. This is January 6, 2026 — the due date had already come and gone, and the countdown was quietly becoming urgent.
There’s something both funny and deeply human about this video: all the waiting, all the hoping, all the movement, and the baby entirely unconcerned and on her own schedule.
Sophia Ingelein Powell arrived January 12, 2026, at 3:57am, after a home birth attempt that turned into 36 hours of labor and an eventual hospital transfer.
Doula Stacy and Erin Show How to Push It Real Good (January 12, 2026)
A moment of levity, and some rhythm, between contractions. Starring Leah’s doula and her irrepressible sister, Erin.
During the final hours of labor at Virginia Hospital Center, our doula Stacy and Leah’s sister Erin stepped up in every way possible. After more than 240 contractions at home and a transfer to the hospital, Leah pushed for three and a half hours. She asked for a mirror. She asked the doctor if her husband could catch the baby.
He could.
Happy Mom with Sophia (January 12, 2026)
New mom Leah and an infant as uncomprehending as a squirrel, a lemur, a newborn puppy. Meet Sophia.
After 36 hours of labor — including 240+ contractions at home and three and a half hours of pushing in the hospital — this is what Leah looked like with our daughter Sophia for the first time.
There is no better word for it than happy.
She's So Chill (January 12, 2026)
Moments after birth, a newborn leaves an alternative universe — dark, watery, breathing liquid — and enters a new world entirely, as in the epics about heroes. Welcome, Sophia, and bon voyage.
In the hours after her birth, Sophia Ingelen Powell was so chill.
Our Little Hiccup Enters the World (January 12, 2026)
Eight hours after she was born, Sophia discovers the hiccup, and her first nickname is born.
She arrived at 3:57am on January 12, 2026, weighing seven pounds and two ounces, with feral black eyes and the posture of a small alien. We called her our little hiccup — and our little burrito, and our little tomato, and at least six other names in the first twenty-four hours.