An Honest Letter to Past Tom About the Best Baby Shower Gifts

I'm currently staring at a cashmere baby cardigan roughly the size of a teacup, aggressively regretting my life choices. My mate Dave’s gathering is tomorrow afternoon, and I'm writing this as a therapeutic exercise directed entirely at my past self—specifically the Tom from six months ago who confidently bought an electric wipe warmer and a miniature tuxedo for my cousin's newborn. When you're a childless person attending a celebration of impending parenthood, you shop purely for the aesthetic. You want the collective chorus of "aww" from the room when your beautifully wrapped box is opened. When you actually have two-year-old twin girls who currently believe bedtime is a hostile negotiation tactic, you understand that an infant doesn't need dry-clean-only knitwear. They need survival gear.

This is my formal apology to every parent I ever bought a gift for before I had children of my own, and a rough guide to the baby shower gifts that actually keep a household functioning when everyone is operating on two hours of broken sleep.

The absolute tyranny of the gift registry

There's a specific type of madness that overtakes perfectly rational adults when they receive a registry link. They look at a carefully curated list of unglamorous necessities—a grey plastic nappy bin, thirty muslin cloths, a breast pump that looks like medieval torture equipment—and they think to themselves, "No, what they really need is a giant stuffed giraffe that plays Mozart."

If you take nothing else away from my sleep-deprived ramblings, let it be this: respect the registry. The expectant parents have likely spent weeks agonizing over that list, reading endless reviews about which digital thermometer is least likely to give a wildly inaccurate reading at three in the morning. They didn't put a boring beige nursing pillow on there by accident. They put it there because their lower back is already disintegrating, and they desperately need physical support to feed their impending offspring without permanently damaging their posture.

Going off-registry because you spotted a cute wooden xylophone in a boutique shop is an act of mild sabotage. You're forcing exhausted people to find storage space for a loud instrument they didn't ask for, while they still have to go out and buy the nasal aspirator you decided was too gross to purchase.

A brief note on newborn shoes

Don't buy them, they're entirely pointless for a creature that can't walk and spends its entire existence lying horizontally while leaking various fluids.

Sleep stuff that doesn't terrify the health visitor

Before the twins arrived, I assumed babies just slept in standard cots with nice fluffy blankets, perhaps a matching pillow, and a few soft toys surrounding them like a woodland fairytale. Our NHS health visitor rapidly cured me of this delusion during a home visit. She took one look at the pile of beautiful, thick hand-knitted blankets we’d been generously gifted, sat us down, and told us in a wonderfully bleak British manner that absolutely none of them could go in the cots with the girls.

From what I gathered from the rather terrifying leaflets they handed us regarding safe sleep, an infant's brain hasn't quite figured out the whole "breathe when there's fabric over your face" mechanism yet. The cot must resemble a completely empty prison cell. Just a tightly fitted sheet, and the baby zipped into a wearable sleeping bag. Nothing loose. Ever. No decorative bumpers, no positioning pillows, and certainly no thick blankets to get tangled in.

So, what do you do with the blankets you receive? You use them for literally everything else but sleeping. We were given the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket Eco-Friendly Purple Deer Pattern from Kianao, and while it never once entered the twins' cots, it became the hardest working piece of fabric in our house. The purple and green deer pattern is chaotic enough to hide mysterious stains, and the organic cotton is brilliant for tossing on the floor during tummy time so the girls could drool on a clean surface rather than directly onto our rug. It works perfectly over the pram when the wind picks up, or draped over my shoulder to catch spit-up while looking vaguely stylish. If you're buying a blanket for a baby shower, that's what you're buying it for—a multi-purpose protective shield for the outside world, not a bedding item.

Wardrobe malfunctions at three in the morning

If you're hellbent on buying clothing for a baby shower, there are two fundamental truths you must accept. First, babies grow at an alarming, almost parasitic rate. A newborn is only newborn-sized for about thirty-six hours before they morph into a heavier, denser potato. Buying "Newborn" size clothing means the parents might get to put it on the kid once for a photo before it becomes entirely useless. Buying sizes in the 6-9 month range is a spectacular move, because right around month six, parents realise they've absolutely nothing that fits and panic.

Second, we need to talk about fastenings. Fumbling with twelve tiny metal poppers in the pitch black while a small human screams at you as if you've personally offended their ancestors is a uniquely horrible experience. You inevitably skip a popper, get to the top, realise the fabric is completely misaligned, and have to start all over again while the crying intensifies. Zips are the only acceptable fastening for sleepwear. A two-way zip is basically a gift from the heavens.

For daytime wear, you just need sheer volume. I won't pretend the Kianao Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless is going to change your spiritual life. It's, honestly, a vest. But it’s a necessary vest. It's just okay in the sense that it does exactly what it's supposed to do: it covers the torso, it stretches over a massive infant head without getting stuck, and it catches the worst of the inevitable nappy leaks. The fact that it’s made of organic cotton means it survives the boil-wash cycle slightly better than cheap synthetic ones, and you feel marginally less awful about your carbon footprint when you ultimately have to bin one after a truly catastrophic bowel movement.

Looking for gifts that parents will actually use rather than just politely thank you for? Explore Kianao’s organic baby clothes collection for things that survive the wash.

The great weaning disaster of our time

You probably aren't thinking about solid food when you attend a baby shower, because the baby hasn't even arrived yet. But fast forward six months, and those parents are going to hit the weaning stage, which I can only describe as trying to feed a blender without putting the lid on.

We started the girls on solid food with regular plastic bowls, which was a spectacular tactical error. Twin A quickly learned that if she slammed her hand down on the edge of the bowl, the resulting catapult effect could launch mashed carrots directly onto the kitchen ceiling. Twin B preferred the "slow push," maintaining direct eye contact with me while slowly inching her bowl off the highchair tray until it crashed onto the tiles below.

If you want to be the hero of the baby shower, buy them weaning gear for the future. The Walrus Silicone Plate is genuinely the only reason my kitchen isn't entirely coated in pesto. It has a suction base that's absurdly strong. The first time we used it, Twin A grabbed the walrus's head and tried to lift it, and ended up lifting the entire highchair tray slightly off its hinges. It was glorious. She looked utterly defeated by the physics of it. The divided sections also stop the baked beans from touching the cucumber, which is apparently a culinary crime punishable by forty minutes of solid crying in the toddler world. Gifting this plate alongside a massive bib is the kind of forward-thinking genius that parents will text you about in gratitude six months down the line.

Things for the people who haven't slept since Tuesday

The most shocking thing about having a baby is how quickly you completely cease to exist as a separate entity. You become simply a life-support system for a smaller, louder human. Everything you receive is for the baby. Tiny socks, tiny hats, soft toys, sensory books.

The best present we received wasn't for the twins at all. My old editor sent a digital gift card for a food delivery service with a note that just said, "Don't cook this week." We used it at 9:00 PM on a Thursday when we were both too tired to chew, let alone chop an onion. It felt like winning the lottery.

Putting together a survival kit for the actual adults is a brilliant alternative to baby clothes. Throw in some high-strength paracetamol, dry shampoo, proper coffee beans, a massive water bottle (breastfeeding apparently makes you thirstier than a marathon runner), and whatever snacks can be eaten silently with one hand in the dark. It acknowledges that keeping a tiny human alive takes a massive physical toll, and sometimes the caregivers need to be looked after too.

Ready to abandon the idea of buying a tiny tuxedo and get something genuinely useful instead? Browse our practical baby accessories to find something that will honestly survive the toddler years.

Frequently Asked Questions From Clueless Gift Buyers

Is it really that bad if I buy clothes with poppers instead of zips?

Yes. It's worse than you can possibly imagine. At 3 AM, when you're functioning on a microscopic amount of sleep and the baby is thrashing around like a freshly caught salmon, attempting to line up tiny metal snaps is a form of psychological torture. Save a parent's sanity. Buy the zips.

What's a reasonable amount of money to spend on these things?

If it's a colleague you only speak to when the office printer jams, clubbing together with your team to buy a twenty-quid pack of premium nappies is perfectly fine. If it's your sibling or best mate, you should probably be looking at the bigger ticket items on their registry—maybe chip in with someone else to cover the expensive pram or the fancy baby monitor they're terrified of buying themselves.

Are cuddly toys really that terrible of an idea?

They aren't terrible in theory, but in practice, every single person who doesn't know what to buy defaults to a soft toy. The child will receive roughly fourteen teddy bears, three knitted rabbits, and a plush elephant. Unless the toy serves a functional purpose (like emitting white noise to drown out the sound of the postman), it's just going to sit in a corner collecting dust until the child is old enough to drag it through a muddy puddle.

I want to buy a beautiful quilt for the baby's cot. Why are you telling me not to?

Because the NHS and basically every medical professional on earth will tell the parents to immediately remove it. Cots have to be bare to reduce the risk of SIDS. Babies sleep in wearable sleeping bags now, not under loose blankets. If you buy a beautiful quilt, it'll be used as a playmat on the floor. Which is fine, as long as you make peace with it being covered in mashed banana within a week.

Do parents really want to receive boxes of nappies at a party?

Absolutely. It might feel like handing someone a pack of toilet roll for their birthday, but nappies are shockingly expensive and you go through roughly ten a day in the beginning. Showing up with a giant box of size two or size three nappies (skip the newborn ones, they grow out of them in ten minutes) is the most romantically practical thing you can do for a sleep-deprived couple.