Dear Tom: A guide to surviving the very weird baby alien phase

Dear Tom,

You're currently sitting on the edge of a spectacularly uncomfortable plastic mattress in the maternity ward at St Thomas' Hospital, staring into a perspex box containing two squirming, purple, vernix-covered creatures. They look less like the cherubic infants you've seen in the Pampers adverts and substantially more like something that burst out of John Hurt's chest in 1979. They have disproportionately massive heads, their limbs are scrunched up like chicken wings, and they're making noises that can only be described as reptilian. You're terrified, running entirely on lukewarm NHS tea, and seriously questioning whether human genetics have somehow skipped a generation and delivered you a pair of extraterrestrials.

I'm writing to you from two years in the future to tell you to put the tepid tea down and just breathe, because this is completely normal, though nobody warns you just how weird the beginning actually is.

You expected soft cooing and instant, deep bonding. What you've received is a biological hostage situation where your captors communicate entirely in shrieks and require you to wipe a substance that looks exactly like roofing tar off their tiny bottoms every three hours.

The bizarre biology of the fourth trimester

Our health visitor, Brenda—a woman who possessed the terrifying, no-nonsense competence of a seasoned bomb disposal expert—came round to our flat on day four and caught me frantically trying to stop the twins from rhythmically punching themselves in their own faces. I was convinced they had a rare neurological disorder. Brenda just laughed, drank our last drop of oat milk, and vaguely explained the concept of the fourth trimester.

Apparently, human offspring are the most useless newborns in the animal kingdom, and their nervous systems are basically just incredibly slow dial-up modems desperately trying to connect to the outside world. They've spent nine months in a hot, cramped, incredibly noisy liquid environment, and the sudden expansion of space is terrifying to them. That jerky, flailing movement where they suddenly throw their arms out as if falling from a great height? Brenda told me it's called the Moro reflex, which is just a fancy medical term for "startling yourself awake just as your exhausted father finally sits down to eat a cold slice of toast."

The only defense against the startle reflex, as I eventually learned through trial, error, and an embarrassing amount of tears (mine, not theirs), is swaddling them so tightly they resemble organic cotton burritos, creating a physical boundary that mimics the womb and prevents them from accidentally giving themselves a black eye.

A severe warning about 3am internet searches

Let me give you a very specific, deeply urgent piece of advice about navigating this period. When you're sitting in the dark at 3:14 AM, trying to figure out why your tiny martians have cone-shaped heads or weird rashes, you'll turn to Google. You must be phenomenally careful with your search terms, because the internet is a dark, twisted place that doesn't care about your innocent parental panic.

For instance, when Halloween rolls around and you think it would be hilarious to dress them up as little extra-terrestrials, you might go looking for novelty clothes in an extra-extra-extra small size. Don't, under any circumstances, type baby alien xxx into your search bar. Your exhausted brain might think you're specifying a garment size, but the internet algorithms will aggressively disagree, and you'll see things that will permanently scorch your retinas. Similarly, don't assume baby alien porn is just a trendy internet slang term for aesthetically pleasing nursery decor (you know, in the same innocent vein as 'food porn' or 'cabin porn' on Instagram). It's profoundly, irrevocably not, and you'll have a very difficult time explaining your browser history to your wife the next morning.

And when the local dads in your NCT WhatsApp group start gossiping about a baby alien leaked scandal, don't click the link assuming it's some top-secret Area 51 UFO footage that somehow made it to Twitter. It's inevitably just a viral TikTok video of a catastrophic, up-the-back nappy blowout that completely ruined someone's beige Bugaboo pram. I won't even attempt to explain why your brother-in-law will eventually text you a link to a baby alien fan bus (it's a weird toy vehicle brand crossover that makes absolutely zero sense), but just avoid clicking anything that sounds vaguely suspicious. Stick to the official NHS website and the CBeebies app. Trust me, your sanity is already hanging by a thread; you don't need to battle the dark web on top of sleep deprivation.

Covering the mothership's newest arrivals

Once you accept that you're living with two volatile, easily startled creatures, your entire existence becomes about managing their sensory environment. You'll buy white noise machines that sound like a jet engine idling in your living room (because total silence actually freaks them out). But the biggest game-changer is what you put them in.

I know you're currently looking at the tiny, stiff denim jeans someone gifted us and thinking they look cute. Throw them out. The girls will despise them. The only thing that got us through those early months was the Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao. I'm not exaggerating when I say they lived in these. When their skin was going through that weird peeling phase (another horrifying thing nobody warns you about—they shed like tiny snakes for the first two weeks), synthetic fabrics made them break out in angry red spots. The organic cotton was a lifesaver. It’s stretchy enough to accommodate the fact that you've to pull it down over their bodies when the inevitable nappy disasters happen (because pulling a soiled collar over a newborn's head is a mistake you only make once). It became our uniform.

If you're currently trying to figure out how to clothe your own tiny lifeforms without triggering a meltdown, I highly suggest browsing Kianao's organic baby clothes before you waste money on things that look nice but feel like sandpaper.

Eventually, they interact with Earth

Around the three or four-month mark, the extraterrestrial fog begins to lift. They stop staring blankly into the middle distance and actually start focusing on objects. This is when you panic and buy a million toys hoping to stimulate their rapidly forming brains.

We got the Wooden Baby Gym, which is genuinely lovely to look at and doesn't play aggressive electronic circus music that will make your left eye twitch. They liked batting at the little wooden elephant, though mostly they just lay underneath it trying to figure out how their own hands worked. Later, when the teething started and the drool volume reached biblical proportions, we threw the Panda Silicone Teether at them, which is fine, it’s a piece of silicone shaped like a panda that they chewed aggressively for weeks and then promptly lost down the back of the sofa.

Embracing the weirdness with toddlers

Here's the twist, Tom. Just as they start looking like actual human children and losing their newborn weirdness, they hit two years old, and you've to lean right back into the alien narrative all over again, this time as a psychological survival tactic.

Two-year-old twins are essentially highly emotional, deeply irrational beings who refuse to comply with basic earthly physics or societal norms. When one of them decides that broccoli is poison and throws herself on the kitchen floor in a puddle of her own tears, logic won't save you. You can't explain nutritional science to a toddler.

Instead, you've to rebrand the broccoli as "alien trees from the Black Forest." Suddenly, they aren't eating vegetables; they're giant monsters conquering a tiny green planet. Water is rejected, but "moon juice" is chugged enthusiastically from a sippy cup. When we walk down the high street and they want to run into traffic, I don't shout about road safety. I whisper that we're space explorers who have to hold hands so we don't float away in the anti-gravity zone, and we've to blend in with the Earthlings by walking in a straight line.

It's exhausting, slightly unhinged, and requires you to abandon whatever dignity you've left. But it works. The whole journey is just learning to accept that you're no longer in charge of the mothership. You're just the maintenance crew, desperately trying to keep the systems running while the tiny captains scream at you in a language you only half understand.

Hang in there. In about two years, one of them will hand you a half-eaten piece of toast, pat your shoulder, and call you "Daddy," and you'll realize you wouldn't trade the invasion for anything.

Ready to admit defeat and stock up your own mothership? Check out the full Kianao shop to find gear that honestly survives contact with the enemy.

Questions I frantically searched at 3am (Answered)

How long do they look this bizarre?
Honestly, the cone head goes down in a few days (it's just from being squeezed through the birth canal, which sounds horrific but is perfectly normal). The scrunched-up limbs and constant jerky movements start to fade around three to four months as their nervous system finally boots up and they figure out gravity exists.

Why do they constantly wake themselves up punching the air?
That’s the Moro reflex in action. Their brain basically glitches and thinks they're falling, so they throw their arms out to catch themselves, smack themselves in the face, and wake up screaming. Swaddling is literally the only way to stop it until they outgrow the reflex.

Are the organic bodysuits really worth the extra money?
Yes, mostly because newborn skin is incredibly weird and prone to peeling, baby acne, and random rashes that will make you panic. The organic cotton breathes better than the cheap synthetic multipacks we bought from the supermarket, meaning the twins sweat less and woke up less frequently feeling clammy.

Can I just pretend we're on a spaceship forever?
If it gets your toddler to put their shoes on without a forty-five-minute negotiation involving tears, bribery, and the threat of withholding Peppa Pig, you can pretend you're on the Starship Enterprise until they leave for university. Whatever works.

How do you seriously swaddle them without them breaking out?
Page 47 of the parenting book we bought suggests you gently fold them like origami while singing a soft lullaby, which I found deeply unhelpful at 4am when dealing with a thrashing, furious infant. The trick is keeping it tight across the arms but loose around the hips (so you don't mess up their joint development). If they keep doing a Houdini, give up on the blankets and just buy a zip-up swaddle sack. Dignity is overrated; convenience is everything.