One of the joys of new parenthood is getting to dress your baby in all the finery amassed during various showers and shopping trips. But for many parents of preemies, that joy has to be delayed for weeks, maybe months, while their babies mature in the artificial womb of an isolette.

My son, born three months early, spent the first month and a half of his life clad only in a diaper that would have fit around my wrist. Clothes were unnecessary and amid the wires and tubes, frankly, an encumbrance. How I longed to dress him!

Once my baby's doctors in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) thought he had grown and was medically stable enough to be dressed, I found that finding suitable preemie clothes could be as challenging as the search for the holy grail, and just as maddening. A number of stores did not carry sizes smaller than Newborn – a size based on a baby weighing at least 7 pounds – and if I did find a preemie outfit, as often as not, its zippers or snaps were positioned at odds with the monitor leads he still needed.

So what do you look for and where do you look when you are buying clothes for a preemie?

Historically, parents have resorted to desperate, if not creative, measures to clothe their preemie infants. According to Mary Bowers, child life specialist at Cleveland's Rainbow Babies' and Childrens' Hospital, frustrated parents in the not-too-distant past used to take clothes from Cabbage Patch dolls to dress their babies. "Some of the outfits were not appropriate, but some were OK, and they were generally well made," she says.

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