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Power Dressing for Preemies

Finding Practical and Fun Fashions
By Toddie Downs

One of the joys of new parenthood is getting to dress your baby in all the finery amassed during various showers and shopping trips. But for many parents of preemies, that joy has to be delayed for weeks, maybe months, while their babies mature in the artificial womb of an isolette.

My son, born three months early, spent the first month and a half of his life clad only in a diaper that would have fit around my wrist. Clothes were unnecessary and amid the wires and tubes, frankly, an encumbrance. How I longed to dress him!

Once my baby's doctors in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) thought he had grown and was medically stable enough to be dressed, I found that finding suitable preemie clothes could be as challenging as the search for the holy grail, and just as maddening. A number of stores did not carry sizes smaller than Newborn – a size based on a baby weighing at least 7 pounds – and if I did find a preemie outfit, as often as not, its zippers or snaps were positioned at odds with the monitor leads he still needed.

So what do you look for and where do you look when you are buying clothes for a preemie?

Searching the Stores
Historically, parents have resorted to desperate, if not creative, measures to clothe their preemie infants. According to Mary Bowers, child life specialist at Cleveland's Rainbow Babies' and Childrens' Hospital, frustrated parents in the not-too-distant past used to take clothes from Cabbage Patch dolls to dress their babies. "Some of the outfits were not appropriate, but some were OK, and they were generally well made," she says.

Fortunately, commercial clothing lines have started to pay greater attention to their littlest customers. Bowers cites Carter's as a clothing line that she sees on a number of preemie infants. Many department stores carry preemie sizes in the Little Me and Gerber collections, although depending on the store, they can be mixed in among the larger sizes, so you may have to hunt.

Some specialty retailers include preemie sizes in a few of their clothing lines. With these more specialized chains, a phone call is a must before you hightail it to the mall; individual stores do not always carry the preemie sizes, but their clerks can usually tell you of a store that does.

Fashion for Free
Sometimes you will not need to look further than the neonatal nursery for preemie clothing. Many not-for-profit organizations around the country donate hand-made preemie clothes and blankets to hospitals and agencies in their states.

Marianne Doty, chairwoman of Touching Little Lives Inc., based in Circleville, Ohio, reports that her organization supplies preemie clothes and blankets to more than 60 hospitals and agencies in the state. Other organizations located in different states operate in the same fashion, and their clothes will often be the first things that a premature baby wears.

To find out if your state has a similar association, do an online search using "baby" and "501(c)(3) not-for-profit" as your search terms.

Additionally, families of graduated preemies will frequently donate their children's gently used clothing to the NICU to be handed down to other babies or wait until they hear of a premature baby being born in their circle of acquaintances. When my son was in the NICU, we received a box filled with clothes from the friend of a friend. I intend to pass them on either to our NICU or to the next family I know who is having a preemie.

Online Outfits
The Internet provides many sources for preemie clothes. A simple search of "preemie clothes," however, will pull up several thousand hits, the majority of which offer only one or two pieces of clothing.

The Preemie Store carries a large selection of brand names. It also provides a consignment store for gently used preemie clothing, although as with most consignment stores, offerings may be slim at any given time.

Baby Bare Clothing Company offers several sizes covering 1 to 6 pounds; most places carry one preemie size that will fit infants 4 to 6 pounds.

Other online stores that carry several different preemie pieces are Nurture Place and Baby Linq.com.

Practical Clothing for Preemies
Now that you know where to find preemie clothes, what do you look for? If your baby is not connected to any monitors or IVs to make matters complicated, then you can buy whatever kind of clothing that you fancy. For many NICU babies, however, this is not the case; they may be hooked up to heart and respiration monitors by colored wires, called leads, or may have IV tubing taped to their arms or a pulse oximeter lead wrapped around a foot, toe or thumb.

In these scenarios, you want to make dressing as simple as possible, where the clothes can slip on and off with a minimum of fuss. The following make practical, yet stylish, preemie choices:

  • Kimono Tops or Front Tie T-Shirts – You can pair these with preemie pants. Since some preemie pants tend not to have snaps, look for ones with no feet. You can always slip socks or booties on the baby's feet to keep them warm.
  • Sleepers or One-Piece Rompers – Look for styles that snap from neck to feet. In this instance, the presence of feet is OK since you can thread any wires through the openings between the snaps.
  • Baby Gowns – According to Amy Seekely, a NICU nurse at Rainbow Babies' and Childrens' Hospital, nurses appreciate the gowns' open bottoms that allow the monitor leads to hang out the bottom. The open bottoms also allow easy access for nursing care and diaper changes.

Caution: Cute Clothing Ahead
A word of caution should be given. When shopping, you will come across wildly adorable outfits sized for preemies that you will desperately want to buy for your baby.

Before you buy, however, try to visualize your baby in the outfit. Bowers agrees, noting that some preemie clothing is completely wrong for babies that require electronic monitoring. Even if a clothing manufacturer makes a baby outfit in a preemie size, all too often the manufacturer has not really looked at its audience.

So you will see little bubble outfits that button up the back and have no front openings; you will see sleepers that zip up from the foot to the neck and allow no place for wires to peek through. If you must have the outfit, buy it in a newborn size for your baby to wear when she gets home from the hospital.

As a final note, Seekely advises that parents should use moderation when shopping and refrain from buying a vast preemie wardrobe. Remember, preemies are likely to have outgrown preemie sizes soon after they go home from the hospital, or perhaps even before. So it is a better move to buy just a few pieces and cycle them through, because before you know it, you'll be looking at those clothes and swearing your baby was never that small.

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About the Author: Toddie Downs is a freelance writer and the mother of one.

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