A Letter to Myself About Surviving Winter With Baby Overalls

Dear Tom of late October. You're currently standing in the hallway of the flat, sweating profusely through your last clean jumper, holding a heavily padded synthetic snowsuit that looks like it was designed for a deep-sea diving expedition. Maya is screaming because she has just discovered that her own shadow can't be eaten, and Evie is quietly chewing on a rubber doorstop. You're about to attempt to force two volatile toddlers into these Michelin Man costumes just to go buy milk at the corner shop, and I'm writing from the future to beg you to put the puffy suits down.

You haven't realised it yet, but the transition from mild autumn to bitter London winter requires a total overhaul of your logistical strategy. You think you need maximum padding to keep the cold out, but all you're doing is creating two furious, immobile starfish who will begin sweating the moment you step onto the Central line. What you actually need is a proper baby overall, a solid base layer strategy, and a completely different understanding of how sheep work.

Why looking like a marshmallow is actually a terrible car seat hazard

Let's talk about the car seat physics problem, which is something I learned the hard way when our health visitor, Brenda, caught me strapping Evie into the Vauxhall Estate looking like a severely overstuffed sausage. Brenda has the bedside manner of a military general, and she took one look at my handiwork, sighed heavily, and informed me that if I had to brake suddenly on the M25, my daughter would simply launch out of that puffy coat like a wet bar of soap.

I had entirely misunderstood the assignment. I thought thick outerwear meant safe outerwear, but apparently, in a crash, all that synthetic fluff just compresses into nothing, leaving the harness dangerously loose against the actual baby. My panicked, sleep-deprived brain immediately pictured the worst, prompting me to spend three hours reading deeply concerning safety leaflets while the twins systematically dismantled the living room rug. The solution is actually maddeningly simple, though nobody hands you a manual when you leave the NHS ward: you dress them in thin, highly efficient layers, strap them in tight, and put the warmth over the top of the buckles.

The old-school wardrobe revival

This brings us to the aesthetic and functional superiority of vintage baby overalls. I used to roll my eyes at parents in Victoria Park whose children looked like they had just stepped out of a 1940s rationing poster, clad in boiled wool and wooden toggles. I assumed it was just for Instagram aesthetics, a way to visually announce that you buy sourdough and own a manual coffee grinder.

But the joke is completely on me, because those vintage silhouettes really work. Unlike modern fast-fashion plastic onesies that restrict a baby to a waddling penguin gait, traditional baby overalls usually feature things like gusseted crotches and flexible natural fibres. This means Maya can seriously execute her terrifyingly fast commando crawl across the playground without getting wedged in her own trousers. They're durable, they hide the inevitable stains of mashed banana and despair, and they survive being aggressively scrubbed in the sink when a nappy explodes.

Don't buy polyester fleece unless you want your child to smell vaguely like a damp sports hall.

Sheep are apparently thermal geniuses

If there's one thing I wish I could scream through a megaphone at past-Tom, it's the absolute necessity of a baby overall merinowolle. I don't fully understand the science of merino wool, but I assume it involves some sort of ancient agricultural witchcraft. Our GP, a wonderful woman who looks perpetually exhausted by my frantic list of questions, offhandedly mentioned that babies are rubbish at regulating their own body heat and are prone to eczema when they get sweaty and clammy.

Merino wool somehow magically traps the heat when we're standing in a freezing queue outside the pharmacy waiting for more Calpol, but when we drag the double buggy into an aggressively overheated café, it breathes. It pulls the sweat away from their skin so they don't wake up screaming from a nap covered in cold, clammy sweat. It's naturally antibacterial, which is a blessing considering Evie's primary hobby is wiping her drool on her own shoulders.

The trick to making the baby overall winter strategy work is what goes underneath it. You need a base layer that doesn't bunch up at the armpits when you're stuffing a fighting toddler into a wool suit. My absolute favourite discovery for this is the Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao. It's brilliant because the lack of sleeves means you aren't fighting a losing battle trying to pull two layers of fabric down a tiny, uncooperative arm. It sits perfectly flat against their skin, providing a soft, breathable barrier between their delicate, rash-prone toddler bodies and the heavier outer layers. Maya basically lives in hers, though Evie managed to permanently stain hers with pureed carrot within fourteen seconds of ownership. It washes incredibly well, though, keeping its shape even after I've accidentally put it on a 60-degree cycle in a sleep-deprived haze.

If you're currently staring at a pile of wildly inappropriate, overly puffy winter wear, maybe have a quick wade through a proper organic baby clothes collection before you resort to wrapping them in bubble wrap and hoping for the best.

A brief detour into the sheer logistics of outdoor nappy changes

I need to spend a moment discussing the hardware of the baby overall, because this is where a parent's sanity is truly tested. There will come a time—probably in late January, in the freezing wind by the duck pond—when you realise your child has produced a truly spectacular dirty nappy. The wind will be howling. Your fingers will be numb.

If you've purchased an overall with a single, highly complicated row of decorative wooden buttons down the front, you'll weep. You will have to completely undress your screaming child in the freezing cold, exposing their bare chest to the elements while you fumble with stiff buttons and wipe away disaster. You want dual zippers. You want snap-button inseams. You want anything that allows you to access the danger zone without fully removing the garment. I once spent fifteen minutes trying to re-button a boiled wool suit on a park bench while Maya actively tried to hurl herself into a puddle, and it took a year off my life.

Accessories and the reality of winter walks

Getting outside during the winter is less about the baby's health and entirely about stopping the parents from slowly going mad inside a flat covered in crushed Cheerios. You need a daily walk to survive. But the accessories you bring on this walk will make or break the expedition.

For instance, let's discuss teething during the winter. You will think it's a great idea to hand them a teething toy in the buggy to keep them quiet while they're bundled in their overalls. We have this Panda Silicone Teether, and honestly, it's just okay. The panda is cute and the silicone is certainly safe, but when you inevitably drop a damp, drool-covered rubber panda onto a heavily gritted London pavement in February, no amount of frantic wiping on your jeans is going to make it sanitary enough to hand back to a screaming toddler. I spend half of our winter walks carrying a freezing cold panda in my coat pocket while Evie chews angrily on her own woollen cuff instead.

What genuinely works flawlessly, however, is solving the car seat warmth issue I mentioned earlier. Remember how you can't put the bulky overall in the car seat? The legal and safe workaround is dressing them in their thin sleeveless bodysuit and a light jumper, buckling the five-point harness tightly against their chest, and then tucking a blanket tightly over the top of the straps. For this, we use the Bamboo Baby Blanket. This blanket is genuinely lovely—so soft that I've seriously considered stealing it for myself while watching Match of the Day on the sofa. Because it's bamboo, it has that same weird thermal magic as the wool, keeping them toasty in the freezing car without causing them to overheat once the heater finally kicks in on the A406. It tucks perfectly around their legs in the buggy, too, and the leaf pattern distracts them just long enough for me to drink a lukewarm coffee.

A final word of warning to myself

So, past-Tom, put down the synthetic snowsuit. Stop trying to turn your daughters into immobile winter fortresses. Buy the merino wool, accept that you'll need to buy it slightly large so they can wear thick socks underneath, and remember that dragging yourself and two toddlers to the park in the freezing cold is always, ultimately, better than staying inside and watching them dismantle the skirting boards.

Instead of wrestling them into rigid plastic outerwear and hoping for the best while you sweat right through your own coat, just layer a soft cotton bodysuit under a breathable wool overall and accept that you'll still somehow be twenty minutes late to the morning playgroup. It's fine. We all are.

If you want to skip the trial and error that aged me five years in a single season, you can shop Kianao's sustainable baby essentials to find pieces that seriously work in the real, messy world of parenting.

Questions I frantically Googled at 4 AM

Do babies really need a winter overall, or can I just use a blanket?
They definitely need an overall if you plan on leaving the house in a buggy or carrier. Blankets get kicked off immediately into wet puddles, and loose blankets in a pram can be a suffocation hazard if they wiggle down under them. A properly fitted overall stays on no matter how violently they thrash about.

What's the deal with baby overall merinowolle? Is it just expensive sheep hair?
It basically is expensive sheep hair, but it's entirely worth it. Regular wool can be scratchy and synthetic fleece makes them sweat, but merino wool is incredibly fine and keeps stable their temperature. It means you aren't constantly zipping and unzipping them every time you walk in and out of a shop.

Are vintage baby overalls practical or just an aesthetic trap?
Surprisingly, they're brilliant. The older styles were designed before fast fashion, meaning they usually have wide, gusseted crotches that fit giant cloth nappies and allow babies to really bend their knees and crawl. Just make sure you get one with an accessible crotch opening, or you'll regret it.

How do I dress them for the car seat without freezing them?
This is the most terrifying thing to get wrong. Puffy coats are a massive crash hazard because the straps won't sit tight against the collarbone. Dress them in thin, warm layers (like a cotton bodysuit and a fine knit jumper), buckle them in tightly, and then tuck a blanket over the top of the harness. Never put the blanket under the straps.

How many layers does a baby genuinely wear under an overall?
The general rule I vaguely remember a midwife telling me is "one more layer than you're wearing." If I'm wearing a t-shirt and a winter coat, the twins get a sleeveless bodysuit, a long-sleeve top, and their wool overall. Though honestly, just feel the back of their neck—if it's hot and sweaty, take a layer off; if it's cold, add one.