Buying a personalized book before a baby is born runs into an obvious problem: personalization needs details, and at that point the details are still being argued about in a kitchen somewhere.
It is a solvable problem, and which of the four new baby books you want depends mostly on how much has actually been decided.
If the name is settled
New Baby Girl is written to a daughter across the weeks before and after she arrives — the waiting, the guessing, the moment the room went quiet. New Baby Boy covers the same ground for a son: the name that took months to agree on, the bag by the door, the first night home. In both, the name appears on the dedication page and through the story, which is the difference between a nice book and his or her book.
These are the two that work as a shower gift and then keep working. They get read out at the shower, and then they go on a shelf and stay there, because the thing they describe does not stop being true.
The cover colour is not fixed to the title
Worth knowing, because it is easy to miss on the product page: both New Baby Boy and New Baby Girl offer pink, blue and green covers. The title determines how the story is written; the colour is a separate choice.
So if the nursery is green, or the parents have been clear that they are not doing pink and blue, you can take the story that fits and dress it however you like. Green is the one people reach for when a room has been decorated without a colour code.
If the birth is still ahead of you
Baby is on the way is the one written for that stretch specifically. It is addressed to a baby who has not arrived, printed with the name that has already been chosen, and it holds the guessing, the hoping and the room slowly filling with small clothes.
It is a better shower gift than the two above for one reason: it is about the present moment rather than about an arrival that has not happened. Read at a shower it makes sense. Read a year later it makes a different kind of sense, which is the point of it. It starts at $19.99.
If nothing is settled at all
If the name is genuinely undecided — or the parents are not sharing it — do not guess. There is no version of this that ends well, because a personalized book cannot be reprinted for free because a family changed its mind.
Two options. Wait until after the birth and give the book then, which is fine and arguably better, since the older sibling and the grandparents have usually run out of gifts by week three. Or buy Peekaboo for Baby once the name exists and skip the shower entirely.
Peekaboo is the most useful of the four in the first year in any case. Animals hide on every spread while the baby's printed name comes round again and again — which is close to how a baby learns to answer to it in the first place. It is not a keepsake pretending to be a book. It is a book.
Practical notes
New Baby Boy and New Baby Girl start at $39.99; Baby is on the way and Peekaboo start at $19.99. All four come in hardcover and softcover, chosen on the product page. For a first-year book that will be handled by a baby, hardcover survives better. For a shower keepsake that goes straight to a shelf, either is fine.
Books are printed to order in the United States and nothing is held in stock, so allow the two to four business day production window before shipping. Due dates move; shower dates rarely do. Work backwards from the shower, not the birth.
Check the spelling before you pay. What you type appears in your cart, at checkout and on the order confirmation. Personalized books cannot be returned once printed — one copy exists and it has that name on the cover — but tell us fast if something is wrong and we can usually catch it pre-print. Anything damaged or misprinted, we replace free.
The rest of the milestone titles sit in New Baby & Milestone Stories. If there is an older child in the house who is about to be rearranged by all this, that is covered in choosing a big brother or big sister book.