The Truth About Newborn Onesies (And What You Actually Need)

It's 3:14 AM in November of 2017. Maya is exactly three weeks old. I'm wearing a milk-stained nursing bra, one single maternity sock because I lost the other one in the hallway, and I'm holding a mug of coffee that went cold roughly six hours ago. I'm staring at my daughter in her bassinet, paralyzed, because a mustard-yellow explosion has somehow breached her diaper, traveled entirely up her back, and is currently threatening the nape of her neck. Oh god.

This is the blowout. The mythical, terrifying rite of passage.

Before I had kids, my husband Mark and I spent an entire Sunday in our freshly painted nursery, drinking lattes and listening to indie folk music while I lovingly folded tiny, pristine, pastel garments into drawer dividers. I genuinely believed that dressing a baby was an exercise in aesthetic curation. I thought newborn wardrobes were about style. I was an idiot. After kids, you realize very quickly that baby clothes are strictly about tactical fluid containment.

If you're pregnant right now and currently staring at a mountain of baby clothes wondering what you actually need, I'm here to dismantle the delusions I used to have.

How many of these things do you actually need before you lose your mind

If you Google this, some incredibly optimistic parenting blog will tell you that the "golden ratio" is 7 to 14 bodysuits per size. I don't know who came up with this number, but I assume it was a man who has never done a load of laundry in his life.

Here's the reality. Newborns spit up. They drool. They have blowouts that defy the laws of physics. On a good day, Leo went through two outfit changes. On a bad day—like the time he got an ear infection and the antibiotics wrecked his tiny stomach—he ruined four outfits before my mother-in-law even came over for lunch. If you only have seven bodysuits, you're going to be chained to your washing machine.

But that doesn't mean you need fifty of them either. When I was pregnant with Leo, I fell for the temptation of buying newborn infant onesies in bulk from one of those massive fast-fashion retailers. I bought this giant plastic-wrapped eight-pack because it was like, ten dollars. I thought I was a financial genius.

Listen, buying super cheap newborn baby onesies is a trap. I washed those fast-fashion things exactly one time, and they shrank to a size that would comfortably fit a Barbie doll. The fabric felt like actual sandpaper, and the leg holes were so tight they left angry red rings around Leo's chunky little thighs. Anyway, the point is, you don't need a massive quantity of garbage clothes, you just need a solid rotation of maybe 10 to 12 high-quality pieces that can actually survive a hot water wash cycle.

The middle of the night snap button nightmare

I need to talk about crotch snaps for a minute because I've a lot of residual anger about this.

Who designed these? Who thought it was a good idea to put tiny, microscopic metal snaps on the bottom of a garment meant for a squirming, screaming creature at three in the morning? When you're sleep-deprived and functioning on fumes, trying to align three metal snaps in the dark is like trying to defuse a bomb. You miss one. You get to the end and realize there's an extra flap of fabric hanging out. You have to undo them all and start over while your baby screams loud enough to wake the neighbors.

Which is why zipper and wrap styles are the only things that kept me sane during the first two months. Kimono-style wrap shirts are amazing because you don't have to pull anything over their fragile little floppy heads, and they don't rub against the weird, crusty umbilical cord stump that you're constantly terrified of touching.

But the real secret? The envelope neckline. You know those weird little folded flaps on the shoulders of baby bodysuits? I thought they were just a weird design choice. I didn't know until the great 3 AM Maya Blowout Incident that those flaps are engineered so you can pull the entire garment DOWN over the baby's body, sliding it off their shoulders and down their legs, rather than dragging a poop-covered collar over their face and hair.

I literally cried when Mark showed me a YouTube video explaining this. It changed my life.

I also stopped buying those tiny separate hand mittens that fall off in three seconds and just bought stuff with the little fold-over cuffs attached to the sleeves.

If you're currently panic-buying before your due date, you can browse Kianao's organic baby clothes collection here and save yourself a trip to the mall.

The great organic cotton debate and my wobbly understanding of it

Before kids, I thought "organic" baby clothes were just a marketing scam to get anxious millennials to part with their money. Then Leo got eczema.

It started around two months old. He had these awful, dry, red, scaly patches all over his chest and the back of his neck. I was dressing him in these thick polyester fleece outfits because it was January and I was terrified he was going to freeze to death. I took him to our doctor, Dr. Miller, convinced he had some kind of rare allergy.

Dr. Miller took one look at him and sighed. She explained to me—and my understanding of this is probably medically shaky, so bear with me—that baby skin is basically paper-thin and absorbs everything. She also said their sweat glands don't really work yet. So when I put him in synthetic materials like polyester, it was basically like wrapping him in a plastic bag. It trapped all his body heat, he couldn't control his temperature, and the chemical dyes in the cheap fabric were triggering a massive skin freakout.

She told me to throw the synthetic stuff away and switch to organic cotton or bamboo. I was so mad that I had wasted money on the cheap stuff, but I bought the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie from Kianao and it was like night and day.

This is honestly my favorite base layer I've ever owned. First of all, it has flat seams and zero scratchy tags, which is huge for eczema babies. It's ridiculously stretchy, so it honestly glides over their head without a fight. We used these sleeveless ones constantly—under sleepers at night, under sweaters during the day, or just by themselves when the house was hot. They survived so many blowout washes and never lost their shape.

Freezing weather and panic layering

Since both my kids were born in the colder months, figuring out how to layer newborn baby onesies for winter was a massive source of anxiety for me.

I used to bundle Maya up like a little marshmallow. I'd put her in a bodysuit, then a sweater, then a sleep sack, and then I'd wrap a blanket around her. She would wake up screaming and sweating. It turns out, babies genuinely overheat really easily, which is terrifying because you're constantly told that cold babies cry and hot babies... well, you know.

The trick is breathable layers. You put them in a good organic cotton bodysuit, a footed sleeper, and maybe a swaddle or blanket if it's drafty.

For Maya, we used the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket with Squirrel Print a lot. Okay, honest opinion: I don't love the squirrel pattern. I'm a boring beige millennial who likes solid colors, and the dancing woodland creatures are a bit much for my personal taste. Mark, however, is obsessed with it and thinks it's hilarious. But aesthetic disagreements aside, the actual blanket is incredible. It's double-layered organic cotton, so it's heavy enough to keep them warm when you're moving from a cold car to a heated house, but it breathes so they don't get clammy.

The absolute trap of gendered baby clothes

Can we talk about the sizing and gender chaos for a second?

When I was pregnant with Leo, I bought a whole drawer full of "Newborn" size clothes. Leo was born weighing nine pounds, two ounces. He looked like a toddler fresh out of the womb. We couldn't even snap the newborn clothes over his diaper. Mark literally had to run to the store on our second day home to buy 0-3 month sizes while I sat on the couch crying into my soup. Most babies grow out of the newborn size in like, three weeks anyway.

And then there's the gender thing. When we found out Maya was a girl, my extended family went absolutely feral trying to find a newborn infant onesie for a girl, which apparently means it has to be neon pink, covered in glitter, and feature a scratchy tulle tutu attached to the butt.

Why do they make clothes with lumps and tutus on the back for a human being that spends 18 hours a day lying flat on their back? It's completely unhinged. They don't need a gala dress. They need soft, neutral basics that you can bleach the hell out of when they inevitably poop on them.

Once you really manage to get them dressed in something soft and neutral without crying, you can finally put them down. I used to just slide Maya under her Panda Play Gym Set in the living room so I could sit on the rug for ten minutes and pretend I had my life together.

If you can just avoid buying those massive packs of sandpaper-textured fast-fashion clothes and maybe figure out how the shoulder flaps work without a YouTube tutorial, you're honestly doing great.

Ready to ditch the synthetic fast-fashion stuff? Shop the Kianao organic essentials collection right here before your baby ruins another outfit.

Questions I frantically googled at 2 AM

How many onesies do I really need to buy?

If you've a washing machine in your house and you don't mind doing laundry every two days, you can survive on 8 to 10 good ones. If you've to go to a laundromat or you just hate laundry, you probably want closer to 15. Just don't buy 30 of the newborn size because your kid might come out the size of a linebacker like mine did and never wear them.

What's the difference between a bodysuit and a onesie?

Honestly? Nothing. "Onesie" is technically a trademarked term by Gerber, which I found out during a deep internet rabbit hole while pumping, but everybody just uses it to mean the little shirt things that snap over the crotch. Bodysuit is just the non-trademarked name. They're the exact same thing.

Are organic baby clothes honestly worth the money?

In my messy, personal experience, yes. I thought it was pretentious nonsense until my son's skin started peeling off from cheap polyester blends. If your kid has zero skin sensitivities, maybe you don't care, but organic cotton is just so much softer and it doesn't trap their body heat and make them sweaty and angry.

How do I get poop stains out of these things?

Okay, the secret is cold water and sunshine. If you wash a blowout in hot water, you literally cook the poop into the fabric forever. Rinse it in freezing cold water in the sink immediately, scrub it with some dish soap or stain remover, wash it on cold, and then dry it outside in the direct sun. The sun bleaches it out. It's like magic.

When do they stop wearing bodysuits?

Usually around the time you start potty training, so like, two-ish? Unsnapping a crotch while trying to wrestle a toddler onto a tiny plastic toilet is a special kind of hell, so you'll naturally switch to regular t-shirts when that phase hits.