Baby Pips & Blowouts: The Honest Newborn Prep Letter I Needed

I'm sitting on the icy tile of our tiny upstairs bathroom. It's 3:17 AM. I know the exact time because the harsh blue light of my phone is the only thing illuminating the dark, and I'm wearing my husband Dave's aggressively stained UCLA hoodie that smells faintly of spit-up and desperation. I've my phone out, and I'm desperately trying to type "baby prep" or maybe just "baby p" into the search bar with my left thumb while awkwardly balancing a sleeping, milk-drunk newborn Maya on my right forearm.

My brain is essentially mashed potatoes at this point. I type in baby pips because in my sleep-deprived hallucination, I'm convinced this is like, a cute British term for infant developmental milestones. You know, like "Oh, little Oliver has reached his next baby pip!"

Spoiler alert. It's not.

I sit there for a solid twenty minutes reading about Japanese candlestick charts and foreign exchange market volatility before I realize that BabyPips is the internet's premier educational platform for Forex day trading. Which honestly makes me cry, because I'm so exhausted I actually considered learning how to trade currency just so I wouldn't have to go back to sleep only to be woken up in forty minutes.

Anyway, the point is.

When you're preparing for a baby, the internet will feed you so much absolute garbage. You spend your entire pregnancy curating this aesthetic, pristine Pinterest board of nursery ideas, completely ignoring the fact that a newborn is basically a beautiful, screaming potato that's going to systematically destroy your house, your sleep schedule, and your dignity. So, since my editor told me I needed to write something about newborn prep, I decided to write the letter I desperately needed to read when I was six months pregnant with Maya.

Dear past Sarah, put down the credit card

First of all, step away from the wipe warmer. I know it looks so cozy in the baby boutique, and you're thinking, Oh god, my precious angel can't have cold wipes on her delicate little bottom at 2 AM. Let me tell you exactly what happens with a wipe warmer. You use it for four days. Then you forget to refill it with water because you haven't slept since Tuesday, and the bottom wipes turn into these crusty, brown, scorched squares of useless fabric that look like dried leaves. Then you just start using cold wipes anyway because you're changing a blowout in the dark and you literally don't care. It's a fire hazard and a waste of money.

And those tiny hard-soled leather baby boots? Foot prisons. Throw them away.

Instead of worrying about the temperature of a damp cloth, you need to prepare for the physical devastation of your own body. Nobody tells you this. They tell you to buy a $400 bassinet, but they don't tell you that you're going to be bleeding and crying and wearing mesh hospital underwear for weeks. My doctor, Dr. Miller—who's basically my therapist at this point—told me during one of Maya's early checkups that maternal depression actually physically impacts infant development. Like, she looked me dead in the eye and said that if I didn't take care of my own physical recovery, the baby would suffer. I think the mechanism has something to do with cortisol levels and emotional mirroring, but honestly I was too busy leaking breastmilk to catch the exact science.

So buy the huge, ugly pads. Buy three peri bottles and leave one in every bathroom. Stockpile granola bars that you can open with one hand using only your teeth. You matter too.

The living room survival station

Here's what's going to happen when you bring that baby home. You think you're going to use the nursery. You're going to rock in the expensive glider and gaze out the window. False. You're going to live on your sofa like a troll.

Dave and I basically built a nest in our living room when Leo was born four years later, because by kid number two you realize that walking upstairs for a fresh onesie is an Olympic sport you aren't trained for. You need to set up "baby stations." Get a basket. Not a cute one, a functional one. Put diapers, wipes, burp cloths, and exactly three backup outfits in it.

Speaking of outfits, let's talk about the clothing trap. With Maya, I bought all these detailed, adorable outfits with buttons down the back and stiff tulle skirts. What a moron I was. When your baby has a catastrophic diaper blowout in the Target parking lot—which will happen, and it'll be mustard yellow, and it'll somehow travel up their back all the way to their neck—you don't want to be dealing with forty-seven tiny buttons.

You want clothes that stretch and survive the washing machine. I'm aggressively picky about this now, but I actually love the Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao. When Leo had a level-five meltdown blowout at a coffee shop, this was the only thing I had in the diaper bag. The organic cotton is super stretchy because it has a tiny bit of elastane in it, so I could just pull the whole thing down over his shoulders instead of dragging poop over his head. Which is the single most important feature of baby clothing, full stop. Plus, Leo had this terrible eczema on his chest, and synthetic fabrics made him break out in red angry hives. This bodysuit is so soft and undyed, his skin seriously cleared up when I stopped putting him in cheap polyester crap.

If you're trying to figure out what honestly matters right now instead of endlessly scrolling, you can take a breath and browse Kianao's organic baby essentials collection for things that are really useful.

Sleep and the terrifying statistics

Sleep hygiene is mostly a joke when you've a newborn, but the safety stuff is not. Dr. Miller scared the absolute hell out of me talking about SIDS. She said the American Academy of Pediatrics says you should share a room with your baby for the first six months, and it reduces the risk of SIDS by like 50 percent.

Fifty percent! That's massive.

She explained that having the baby in the room with you means the ambient noise of your breathing and tossing and turning keeps the baby from falling into an dangerously deep sleep state. I'm probably butchering the exact medical terminology, but basically, your presence keeps them tethered to the waking world. But you're NOT supposed to bed-share. Which is torture, because when it's 4 AM and you're nursing, your brain is screaming at you to just lie down with them.

You have to keep their sleep space aggressively minimalist. No bumpers, no blankets, no stuffed animals. Nothing. It looks sad, like a tiny baby prison, but it's safe. We kept a bassinet right next to Dave's side of the bed, mostly because I made Dave do the burping after I did the feeding. It's called shared duties, look it up.

For playtime, which is basically the only time they're awake and not eating, you don't need the massive plastic monstrosities that light up and sing off-key songs that will haunt your nightmares. I swear, the song from Maya's old plastic jumper is burned into my neural pathways permanently. We ended up getting that minimalist Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys later on. It's just wood and organic cotton. It doesn't sing to you. It doesn't require eight D batteries. It just sits there, looking pretty, while your baby stares at a little wooden elephant. It's calming. And heaven knows you need something in your house to be calming when the dog is barking and the baby is screaming.

Teething and other tiny tortures

Eventually, around four to six months, just when you think you've a handle on this whole parenting gig, the baby will start drooling like a mastiff. Their cheeks get red. They try to shove their entire fist, your car keys, and the cat's tail into their mouth.

Teething.

I bought so many teethers. Some of them were filled with weird liquid that I was terrified would puncture and poison my child. We tried the Panda Silicone Baby Teether from Kianao. I'll be honest, it's a teether. It's completely fine. It's not going to miraculously make your baby sleep through the night or cure their pain entirely. Leo liked chewing on the little bamboo-shaped handle, and Maya mostly just threw it at the cat. What I did appreciate is that it's just one solid piece of food-grade silicone, so I could throw it in the dishwasher and not worry about mold growing inside it (which totally happens with hollow bath toys, by the way, don't Google it unless you want to vomit).

If you put it in the fridge for ten minutes it gets cold enough to numb their gums a little bit without freezing their tiny fingers. So, it does the job. But manage your expectations. Nothing cures teething except time and copious amounts of parental coffee.

Just breathe

Look, past Sarah, and whoever else is reading this in the middle of the night. You're going to mess up. You're going to buy dumb things, you're going to cry in the shower, and you're going to yell at your husband because he's breathing too loudly while you're trying to get the baby to latch.

It's all normal. The fact that you're obsessively researching how to keep this tiny human alive means you're already a good mother. You don't need a pristine nursery. You just need some decent stretch-cotton onesies, a safe place for them to sleep, a huge water bottle for yourself, and the grace to forgive yourself when the day goes entirely sideways.

Before you go down another 3 AM internet hole looking up currency trading or whatever, just grab the absolute basics from the Kianao newborn shop and go to sleep.

The messy, totally unscientific FAQ

Do I really need to wash all the baby clothes before they wear them?
Oh god, yes. I thought this was just a weird myth perpetuated by overly anxious moms, but then I put an unwashed target onesie on Maya and she broke out in this weird scaly rash. Clothing from factories has sizing chemicals and dust on it. Just throw it all in with some gentle, unscented detergent. Don't fold it, folding baby clothes is a fool's errand. Just shove it in a drawer.

How many newborn diapers should I honestly buy?
Not as many as you think! Buy maybe two boxes of newborn size. Some babies (like Leo, who was born looking like a miniature linebacker) are in newborn sizes for literally four days. You're better off stocking up on Size 1 and Size 2. You can always fold down a slightly bigger diaper, but you can't squeeze a chunky baby into a too-small diaper without inviting a blowout of epic proportions.

Is room-sharing honestly necessary if we've a baby monitor?
My doctor was pretty hardcore about this. The monitor only tells you if they're crying, it doesn't do the biological thing of keeping them in a lighter sleep state with your ambient noise. Plus, do you really want to walk down the hall six times a night? Put a bassinet in your room. It ruins the romance for a few months, but you're going to be too tired for romance anyway. Just survive.

When do I need to start buying toys?
Literally not until they're like three months old. For the first two months, their favorite toy is a ceiling fan or a high-contrast shadow on the wall. Save your money. Once they start tracking objects with their eyes and trying to bat at things, a simple wooden play gym is all you need. Don't buy the noisy plastic stuff until a well-meaning grandparent forces it upon you at Christmas.