If You Have a Daughter Who Is Pregnant Right Now, Sit Down for a Moment

I am going to save you five hundred dollars and her a great deal of crying.

I am not writing this to sell you anything. I am writing it because I bought the wrong things first, and I have watched three other women at my church buy the same wrong things since, and every one of them had the money to spend and nobody to tell them where to put it.

Let me start at the beginning.

The call at 2 A.M.

My daughter is twenty-nine. Her son is six weeks old. She called me at 2 A.M. on a Tuesday — not to ask anything, just to cry. The baby had been screaming for four hours. Her husband was holding him in the dark hallway. She was sitting on the bathroom floor with the door closed because she didn't want him to hear her.

I drove forty minutes that night.

When I got there, I did what mothers do. I held the baby. I told her to sleep. She slept for an hour and forty minutes. The baby cried for forty-five of those minutes in my arms.

I want you to understand that I was not helpless that night because I lacked money. I was helpless because I had spent the money on the wrong things — and I had spent it before he was born, which is exactly where you are standing right now.

The five hundred and forty-nine dollars

I added it up, because I needed to know. Here is the list you are probably about to buy.

A $215 cashmere baby blanket. The kind with the initials embroidered in white thread. Beautiful. Useless against the screaming.

An $89 white-noise sheep that plays heartbeat sounds. He liked it for fifteen minutes. Then he didn't.

A $145 vibrating bouncer with the muslin canopy. He fits in it for ten minutes at a time before the screaming finds him there too.

Sixty-two dollars in baby books. The Wonder Weeks. The Happiest Baby on the Block. One about colic written by a pediatrician at a children's hospital. I read all three. None of them helped my daughter at 2 A.M.

Thirty-eight dollars in registry add-ons at her shower in March. The little things that match the nursery. The matching burp cloths. The hand-knit booties.

Five hundred forty-nine dollars.

What the pediatrician said — and didn't give her

At the six-week visit, my daughter asked the pediatrician what to do. He was kind about it. He explained that a colicky baby often settles with gentle warmth across the abdomen and light, steady compression — that it mimics the pressure of being held, and that the warmth helps the gut relax.

Then he wrote nothing down, handed her nothing, and said it would pass by four months.

It would pass by four months. She had ten more weeks of 2 A.M. ahead of her and a name for the thing that would help, and no way to buy it.

That is the part that still makes me angry. He was right. He just didn't finish the sentence.

She found it at 3 A.M. after I'd gone home

She called me the next week, almost embarrassed to bring it up, because it sounded too simple.

A forty-five-dollar belly band. A soft wrap with a warm insert that sits across the baby's tummy — warmth and the gentlest steady pressure, the two things the doctor had named and then walked away from.

She put it on him that night at seven.

He went down at seven-forty. She came in twice to check that he was breathing, because the quiet frightened her. He slept until nearly four.

She texted me at 4:12 in the morning. Three words and a photograph of a sleeping baby.

The two questions I asked her, which you will also ask

Can he wear it all night? Yes. That is the whole point of it, and it is the reason I stopped suggesting the heating-pad trick to anyone. You cannot leave a plugged-in heating pad on a sleeping newborn — nobody who recommends it can tell you how long to leave it on, and that unanswered question is the answer. This is warmth that is made to be slept in.

Does it work with the swaddle? Yes, and this is the question I get asked more than any other. If he is already in his swaddle or sleep sack, it goes on over the top. She has never once had to choose between the two.

About the cheaper one you will find

You will come across a bargain lookalike. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to tell you the category is a trick — the fact that there are copies is proof the idea works.

Here is the difference, and it is the entire difference.

The cheap version comes with nothing behind it. No guarantee. Nothing that says if this does not work for your grandson you are not out the money. And the ones I have handled are not built to be left on a sleeping baby for eight hours — the mothers who use them say they put them on before bed and take them off before he goes down, which is precisely the hours you are trying to fix.

You are not buying the cheapest object that resembles the thing. You are buying the one you can put your name on, hand to your daughter, and stand behind.

My boys were born in 1985 and 1986. My sister-in-law who was a lay midwife gifted me a very similar bed and both my boys used it. I took it everywhere… My boys always felt safe and snuggled. I can see how the belly band would work. What a simple concept and a terrific idea. I will purchase one the next time I need a baby gift!! — Donna MacDonald

“But the guarantee is no good if I buy it before the baby comes”

A woman said this to me almost word for word, and she was right to ask, so let me answer it plainly, because it is the whole reason I am writing to you and not to a mother who already has a screaming baby.

The thirty nights do not start when the box arrives. They start when the baby actually wears it. Buy it in your seventh month, put it in the drawer, and the clock does not begin until the night your daughter finally reaches for it — which, if my house is any guide, will be a night in the sixth or seventh week when she has run out of everything else.

Five hundred forty-nine dollars, and forty-five

I do not regret the blanket. It is beautiful and she will keep it.

What I regret is the order. I bought five hundred and forty-nine dollars of things that were lovely to unwrap, and forty-five dollars of the thing that actually gave my daughter her nights back — and I bought the forty-five-dollar thing last, six weeks late, after she found it herself on a bathroom floor at three in the morning.

You are standing where I was standing in March. You still have the chance to buy it first.

Buy the blanket if you want the photograph. But put the band in the drawer too. It is forty-five dollars, and it is the only gift on that list she will call you about at four in the morning.

One last practical note, since I have been asked: most of the grandmothers I know buy the three-pack rather than the single. Ninety dollars for three. One in the nursery, one in the wash, one in the diaper bag — and honestly, one to hand to the next friend of yours who is about to make the same five-hundred-dollar mistake I did.