Toby’s Shower
for Babies.
Making the NICU feel a little less like a hospital — and a little more like a nursery.
Celebrate the baby. Support the parents. Make the space feel a little more human.
Toby’s Shower for Babies started before I had any intention of starting a nonprofit.
Our son, Toby, had a complicated beginning. During my pregnancy, we were living in Hungary and were told that he was unlikely to survive. We ultimately returned to the United States for medical care, and he was delivered at 32 weeks weighing just two pounds.
That meant becoming NICU parents ourselves.
We were extraordinarily fortunate. Friends surrounded us. People asked what they could bring, what we needed, and how they could help.
But sitting in the NICU, I started noticing something else.
Not every family had that.
NICU families often arrive with no warning.
Some have been transferred from hours away. Some have children waiting at home. Some expected to leave the hospital with a healthy newborn and instead find themselves learning an entirely new vocabulary of monitors, oxygen levels, feeding tubes, and alarms.
And somewhere in all of that medical necessity, the normal experience of having a baby can disappear.
There may be no nursery waiting at home yet. No first-night photos. No little collection of baby things gathered around the bassinet.
The NICU becomes a hospital room first and a nursery second.
I wanted to give parents a little bit of that second part back.
The original idea was simple: build thoughtful gift baskets that could make a NICU room feel a little more like a place where a new baby had arrived.
Support the parents.
Make the space feel a little more human.
Each basket included things that were both practical and intentional: a fleece tie blanket that could be placed over the isolette, swaddles, books, stuffed animals, and a frame and cardstock for capturing tiny handprints and footprints.
The books were especially important. Premature babies leave the protected environment of the womb weeks or months before they ordinarily would. Suddenly they are surrounded by lights, alarms, equipment, and activity. Parents can understandably become quiet and hesitant in that environment.
But their voices still matter.
Giving parents books gave them something incredibly simple to do: sit beside their baby and read. Talk. Be Mom or Dad for a few minutes instead of feeling like a spectator in a medical crisis.
We also included information connecting families with practical assistance and peer support from parents who understood what the NICU experience actually felt like.
I didn’t wait until our own NICU experience was over to start working on it.
We already had a community following Toby’s story online, and people kept asking us the same question: How can we help?
The truth was that we were okay.
So I started asking a different question: What if we took all of that willingness to help us and pointed it toward the families around us?
I met with NICU administrators while Toby was still hospitalized and began figuring out what we could provide, what families actually needed, and how we could get it into their hands.
Then we activated the community. People donated. Volunteers showed up. Supplies started coming in. Events came together.
Within only a few weeks of leaving the NICU ourselves, we were back with our first delivery of roughly 100 baskets — enough to provide one to the families already there and leave additional baskets for the families who would arrive next.
That first delivery brought media attention and momentum, but more importantly, it demonstrated that the idea worked.
So we kept building it.
Starting something is exciting. Sustaining it is operations.
As Toby’s Shower grew, the question became less Can we get people to care? and more: How do we make every donated dollar do as much good as possible?
Storage became an issue. Procurement became an issue. Fundraising was constant.
So we started treating the organization differently. We bought books and supplies in bulk. We developed relationships with companies willing to donate products. Instead of purchasing finished items at retail or vendor pricing, we looked for places where we could buy raw materials and provide the labor ourselves.
One example was swaddles. Instead of continuing to purchase finished swaddles at a significant per-unit cost, we bought them economically and dyed them ourselves.
It meant more work. It also meant the same donation could support more families.
Protect the quality of what we gave families while continually finding smarter ways to produce it.
Fortunately, volunteers were rarely the problem. People wanted to help. My job increasingly became figuring out how to turn that goodwill into something organized, sustainable, and useful.
Eventually, Toby’s Shower became about more than the original gift basket. We started creating experiences.
At Christmas, Santa and Mrs. Claus came into the NICU. Every baby received a present, and families were able to have their baby’s first Christmas photographs taken with Santa — at no cost to them.
It seems like a small thing until you realize what it represents.
For a few minutes, those parents weren’t thinking about whether their baby would be home by Christmas.
They were simply parents taking their baby’s first Santa picture.
Those moments were exactly what the organization was supposed to create.
Of course, none of it happened for free.
Fundraising became a significant part of the work, culminating in events like the Champagne Ball, our major gala fundraiser.
Sponsors helped underwrite the event. Businesses and individuals donated auction items. Supporters came together not only to attend a party, but to fund the next year of work.
Behind the scenes, that meant sponsorships, procurement, donor relationships, event planning, volunteer coordination, and a tremendous amount of personal time and investment.
It was not particularly glamorous.
It was necessary. And it worked.
Toby’s Shower for Babies became a nonprofit organization built around a very small idea:
The organization provided NICU families with practical supplies, developmental resources, community support, and experiences designed to restore a little of the joy that can get buried underneath the medical reality of premature birth.
And the most meaningful feedback never came from an award or an event.
It came from parents telling us what it meant to them.
Around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the model became extraordinarily difficult to continue.
Hospital access changed dramatically. Visitors were restricted. Bringing volunteers, events, and outside materials into NICUs — the very things the organization had been built around — became difficult or impossible.
So the active program largely went quiet.
The nonprofit organization still exists, though, and I have never considered the idea finished.
If Toby’s Shower returns in its next form, it may look different.
And that’s okay. The problem that started it hasn’t disappeared.
Toby’s Shower was probably the first time I realized something that has shown up repeatedly in my life since:
The compassion matters.
But then somebody has to figure out the purchasing. And the storage. And the fundraising. And the volunteers. And the hospital rules. And how to stretch $1 into $1.50 worth of impact.
And sometimes the most meaningful thing you can build starts with noticing something small that everyone else has gotten used to.
I noticed families sitting beside tiny babies in hospital rooms that didn’t feel anything like nurseries.
And I thought we could make that a little better.
So we did.