NICU Mom & NICU Dad Hats

About one in ten American babies spends time in a neonatal intensive care unit. The CDC reports that NICU admission rose from 8.7% of infants in 2016 to 9.8% in 2023. The parents of those babies pick up a private vocabulary, from monitor alarms and feeds to adjusted age and discharge day, and many hospitals mark the end of a stay with a NICU graduation, complete with a cap that carries the days spent in the unit. Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra shared their daughter Malti Marie's NICU graduation after more than 100 days. NICU Awareness Month comes around every September. These hats are for the parent who lived it and kept their sense of humour. NICU MOM and NICU DAD are the plain badges, the two phrases parents type into search boxes. The sentence designs carry the insider jokes: platinum status in the hospital parking lot, a hands-washed counter that reaches 4,000, a mom who knows what that beep means, a dad who changed diapers through a porthole, a baby who is tougher than the parent, and the road from the NICU to kindergarten. DUE DATES ARE OVERRATED is a line that already sells on Etsy shirts, and it comes in a second colorway here along with the porthole diaper line. The tone throughout is proud and wry. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one to the next checkup, or give one to a NICU parent still counting the days.