Preparing for your wife’s delivery day is a big responsibility for Dads. There are obvious things to pack and prepare (like a birth announcement email), but I wanted to share something that proved to be a great keepsake – a white t-shirt with my newborn daughter’s footprints on it.
This task does not really take much preparation – what I did was wear a white undershirt on the day we were headed to the hospital. Once we were all set in the delivery room I told the nurse that when the time came, I wanted to have the baby’s footprints marked on my undershirt – this would happen right after the nurse marks the baby’s footprints on the birth paperwork.
You should bring an extra shirt to change into after the footprints are imprinted on your original shirt – you’ll want to take it off the new souvenir and put it in a safe place, preferably somewhere it won’t get brushed or erased.
Once you get home and things start to settle down, I recommend buying a picture frame, cutting out the area of the t-shirt with the footprints and placing the fabric swatch in the picture frame.
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That’s really cool! I actually didn’t even know they took footprints of newborns (we had ours at home), but I really like that idea. If we have a subsequent one in the hospital I will totally do that.
(though I don’t even know if they do footprints of babies in hospitals in Canada, I should find out)