P is for Preemie!

Preemie. Officially, it's short for Premature.

In my mind, however, I keep thinking of it as being short for Premium.

Part of it is that like any new father, I feel that OUR baby is a cut above the rest, putting her on par with the expensive grade at the gas station.

Then there's the other side of me, who looks at her tiny size and thinks of the word Premium as the technical term for free items found in cereal boxes!

Now through the end of the year, all 24oz size boxes of Baby-O's will include a special Premium!

I've only really been around one preemie baby before, and it was a lot of years ago. My niece Jennifer (or as I generally refer to her, Fennifer) was born early, and spent a lot of time at my house when she was a baby.

I have a couple of memories about her when she was really little.

The first one, and this isn't something I'm proud of, but as you know, that never stops me from writing about it, was the day she came home from the hospital. She arrived while I was at school one day. I came home and set my stuff down and turned on the TV for some quality after school cartoon time. With my eyes mostly fixed on the animated antics, I glanced at the couch as I was about to sit down. There was some stuff on it, looked like Jennifer's older sister had left a doll wrapped up on the cushion, but no reason for me to not sit there. So I just plunked myself down on the couch.

And the doll wiggled and started to cry... OOPS!! That wasn't a doll, that was my newest niece!! I didn't FULLY sit on her, but I did disturb her newborn nap enough that she felt obligated to complain about it. I picked her up and started trying to calm her down, and I was shocked at how tiny and lightweight she was! I'd held a few babies up to that point, but this was almost unreal due to the size...

The second memory of Newborn Fennifer was that she was much too small for any of the baby clothes that were available. Her dad had gone out on a quest for tiny clothes, but all of the newborn size sleepers were like circus tents on her. His brilliant solution was to buy some doll clothes. One outfit actually turned out to be just the right size. It was a grey and white striped overalls outfit, like a train engineer costume. It went on fairly easily, and everything was good until we took a final look at her. The outfit had been intended to go on a Snoopy doll. Snoopy, you may recall, is a dog. Dogs have tails. This adorable little pair of overalls had a round hole in the butt that undid any of the good aspects, like being the right size. It was very hard to clothe a preemie in the early '80s.

Luckily, it looks like we'll have plenty of good, non doll-clothes options available to us for our new little baby girl! A quick search of the web revealed several Preemie-centric stores, and we've gotten several tips that Walmart and Target also carry a decent selection of extra small baby clothes.

So far, my favorite aspect of shopping for preemie clothes is the size names!! Everyone's familiar with the standard designations for Newborn, 0-6 Months, up through 1T-4T... Well in the preemie world, you get fun sizes like Micro, Tiny, and Preemie. The largest size in the Preemie world is Newborn, where you cross over to the mainstream.

If our baby goes to December 4th as planned, she'll be in Tiny clothes... You'd think someone would jump on the marketing opportunity to include Tiny Sleepers as a Preemie Premium in your next box of Preemie-O's!