Burt's Bees Baby Sizing Is Completely Unhinged And I Love It

It was exactly 2:14 AM. I know this because the glowing red numbers on the cheap digital clock my husband insisted we keep in the nursery were burning a hole into my retinas. Maya was four months old, screaming like a tiny, milk-drunk banshee, and I was sitting on the floor in a pair of stained college sweatpants trying to figure out where her legs went. I had just pulled a Burt's Bees sleeper out of the laundry basket, and as I tried to thread her tiny, squirming limbs into the fabric, I realized she looked like a deflated balloon. The legs of this thing trailed down past her feet by at least six inches. It was like a sleeping bag designed for a golden retriever.

I remember just sitting there in the dark, smelling vaguely of sour milk and lavender lotion, holding this impossibly long garment and thinking that I was losing my mind. Leo, who was three at the time, was asleep down the hall, and I was so terrified of waking him up that I was sweating profusely. My husband was snoring in the other room, completely oblivious to the textile warfare happening in the nursery. This was my grand introduction to the reality of sustainable baby clothing, and honestly, it’s a miracle I survived it without ripping all my hair out.

The absolute unit sizing situation

If you've ever bought clothing from this brand, you already know what I’m talking about, but if you haven’t, let me just prepare you. Their sizing is completely unhinged. It's famously, aggressively long. I used to joke with my mom group that they must use baby giraffes as their fit models because there's no way a standard-issue human infant is proportioned like this. Maya was always hovering around the 50th percentile for height, but a 0-3 month onesie from them fit her until she was practically eating solid food.

My husband used to get so frustrated trying to dress her in them. He’d be trying to roll the sleeves up like she was some kind of tiny 1980s Miami Vice detective, muttering under his breath about how nothing in our house made sense anymore. But here’s the weird part—I actually kind of loved it. Because babies grow so damn fast that you blink and they’ve outgrown fifty dollars worth of clothes, so having something that she could wear for months on end felt like a massive victory.

The zipper, though. Oh god, we need to talk about the zipper. For some reason, these sleepers only have a single zipper. Whoever decided that middle-of-the-night diaper changes should require exposing a sleeping infant's entire bare chest to the freezing November air has clearly never parented a colicky baby. You have to unzip them from the neck all the way down, wrestling their little legs out while they scream at the sudden temperature drop. It’s brutal.

During the day, I just couldn't deal with the extra fabric and the zipper drama. I needed her in something that actually fit her body so she could practice rolling over without getting tangled in a yard of organic cotton. That’s when I started exclusively putting her in the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie from Kianao. It’s mostly organic cotton but it has just a tiny bit of elastane in it, which means it actually stretches over their giant bobble-heads without causing a total meltdown. The envelope shoulders genuinely work, and the fabric didn't stretch out and get weirdly bagging around the diaper area after two hours. It just felt like a normal, functional piece of clothing for a baby who wants to wiggle around on a playmat all day without looking like they're wearing their older sibling's hand-me-downs.

The great midnight crib sheet wrestling match

So anyway, back to that night when Maya was four months old. Once I finally got her zipped into the giant giraffe-sleeper, I realized she had leaked through everything and the crib sheet was ruined. Perfect. Just fantastic.

I stripped the bed and grabbed a fresh Burt's Bees organic cotton crib sheet from the closet. Now, if you think their clothing is weird, wait until you try to put one of their sheets on a standard crib mattress at three in the morning. It's a full-body workout. They're so incredibly tight that you need thumbs of absolute steel to hook the final corner over the mattress. I remember kneeling on the floor, using my entire body weight to bend the mattress like a taco just to slip the elastic over the edge, cursing everyone who had ever worked in textile manufacturing.

I genuinely brought this up to my doctor, Dr. Gupta, at her next checkup because I was convinced I was doing something wrong or that I had accidentally bought sheets meant for a bassinet. Dr. Gupta just laughed at me and explained that the extreme snugness is seriously a safety thing. From what I vaguely understand through my sleep-deprived haze, the AAP safe sleep guidelines are super strict about sheets being completely flush to the mattress so there’s zero chance of the fabric bunching up near the baby's face. So the fact that I was sweating through my shirt trying to make the bed was seriously a feature, not a bug. It gave me a tiny bit of peace of mind, even though I still dreaded changing the sheets more than almost anything else in my life.

If you're trying to set up a nursery that doesn't make you want to cry every time you walk into it, you really just have to find a balance between the super-strict safety gear and things that really bring you joy. I highly suggest browsing through some organic baby clothing collections that have a bit more give to them, because you can't fight with every single textile in your house. You just don't have the energy.

Dealing with the drool apocalypse

By the time Maya hit five months, the teething started, and my entire life became about managing bodily fluids. She was drooling so much she constantly looked like a tiny, rabid bulldog. Her chin was perpetually soaked, which led to this horrible, angry red drool rash that spread down her neck.

My mom kept telling me to just slather her in Aquaphor, which I did for a while because I was desperate. But I kept reading all these weird things online about petroleum jelly—like, I don't totally get the chemistry of it, but something about how petrolatum just sits on top of the skin like a plastic wrap instead of genuinely letting the skin breathe or heal. I don't know if that's 100% scientifically accurate, but it freaked me out enough that I went looking for an alternative.

I ended up buying the Burt's Bees multipurpose healing ointment, mostly because it was right there in the aisle at Target and I was too tired to go to a specialty store. It’s made with coconut oil and beeswax, and honestly, it smells like a really expensive natural candle. It’s incredibly thick, almost like a paste, but it melts into the skin when you rub it in. I started putting it on Maya's chin and neck before every nap, and I think the beeswax created this natural barrier that kept the drool off her skin without suffocating it. It was the only thing that genuinely cleared up the redness, and I started using it on my own chapped lips because why the hell not.

But the ointment was just treating the symptom, right? The actual problem was the teething. She wanted to gnaw on absolutely everything—my fingers, the straps of her car seat, the dog’s tail. I bought her the Panda Silicone Baby Teether from Kianao and it was like I had handed her the holy grail. She would sit in her high chair and aggressively chew on the little bamboo stalk part of the panda for forty-five minutes straight. I loved it because it’s just one solid piece of food-grade silicone, so there’s no weird nooks and crannies where mold can grow, and when she inevitably dropped it on the dirty kitchen floor, I could just angrily chuck it into the dishwasher and be done with it. It gave her gums so much relief that the drooling honestly slowed down a bit.

The desperate 4 AM shopping sprees

Parenting is basically just a series of phases where you throw money at a problem until everyone stops crying. But buying high-quality organic cotton stuff is expensive, and I'm definitely not made of money.

There was this specific type of desperation that would hit me around 4:17 AM. I’d be pinned under a sleeping infant who would wake up the second I tried to move her to the crib, my phone battery would be hovering at 9%, and I’d be scrolling the internet buying things we probably didn't need. I'd literally be typing a burts bees baby discount code into the checkout box with my thumb, holding my breath, praying it would knock twenty bucks off the cart so I could justify buying out-of-season clearance pajamas for next winter.

That’s genuinely how I ended up with a lot of our toys, too. Just random, sleep-deprived cart additions. Like the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. I bought them because they looked cute and the description said they were formaldehyde-free soft rubber, which sounded great. Honest review? They’re fine. They're soft enough that when Leo inevitably used them as projectiles to throw at his sister, nobody got a concussion. But mostly they just ended up kicked under the television stand where they gathered dog hair. They float in the bathtub, which is kind of cool, but I wouldn't say they changed my life. Save your money for the things that seriously solve a problem, like the onesies that fit or the teethers that stop the screaming.

The reality is, half the stuff you buy for your kids is going to annoy you, and the other half is going to inexplicably save your sanity. You just kind of have to figure out what works for your specific kid's weirdly shaped body and your own tolerance for midnight zipper wrestling.

If you're in the thick of it right now and you just want baby stuff that seriously makes sense for the way human beings live, go check out Kianao's lineup of organic cotton and silicone gear. It might just save you a 3 AM breakdown.

The messy, honest FAQs

Are Burt's Bees baby clothes supposed to be this huge?

Yeah, oh my god, yes. It's not just you. They run ridiculously long. If you've a baby with long legs, it's the greatest thing ever because they won't outgrow the footies in three weeks. But if your baby is on the smaller side, definitely size down or they'll look like they're wearing a puddle of fabric. I just learned to roll the sleeves up and accept the chaos.

Why are their crib sheets so impossible to put on?

Because safety, apparently. My doctor told me that the AAP guidelines require crib sheets to be incredibly tight so they can't pop off and become a hazard while the baby is sleeping. It takes actual muscle to get them onto the mattress, and it sucks when you've to do it in the middle of the night, but it does mean you don't have to worry about the fabric bunching up near their face. Small victories, I guess.

Is their healing ointment genuinely better than Aquaphor?

In my highly unscientific but deeply personal opinion, yes. Aquaphor is basically just petroleum jelly, which I found just sat on top of Maya's drool rash and made it slimy. The Burt's Bees stuff has beeswax and coconut oil, and it feels like it honestly sinks into the skin and heals it while creating a barrier against the wetness. Plus it doesn't leave grease stains on all my shirts.

Does silicone really help with teething more than other stuff?

Look, I tried the wooden rings, the plastic keys, the weird gel things you put in the freezer that get way too cold. Food-grade silicone was the only thing that worked for us. It has enough squish to feel good on their sore gums but it's firm enough to honestly provide pressure. And mostly I just love that you can throw it in the dishwasher to sanitize it because I'm way too tired to hand-wash a teething toy.

How do you genuinely afford organic baby clothes?

You hunt for sales like it's an Olympic sport. I never bought anything full price. I'd scour the internet for discount codes at 3 AM and buy all my organic cotton stuff during end-of-season clearance sales. Buying direct from the brand's website usually gets you better deals than the big box stores, and you just buy a size up for next year and shove it in a closet until they grow into it.