Giving Back.

From the minute we left the hospital we knew that we wanted to give back in some way to both the Bereavement Suite in the hospital and the charity (4Louis) that donated our memory box. We knew that we needed time first, before launching into any kind of fundraising efforts but I woke up this morning, 2 months after Hallie's birth and couldn't think about anything else.

Michael and I, alongside our families have all expressed a need to give back to those who helped make such an awful and traumatic event just that little bit easier to cope with. We hope to raise as much money as possible to fund more memory boxes and cold/cuddle cots for bereavement suites within hospitals throughout the UK. I also hope to encourage those of my friends and family who proudly wield a set of knitting needles to donate some little hats and blankets for tiny babies and send them to me and I will take care of delivering them personally (drop me a line on my contact form for the address to send them to! It would be nice to have enough items to fill a box with for delivery around Christmas time with some goodies included for the Staff too.)

I thought I would write about the reasons why these items meant so much to us as bereaved parents in the hope that it will create an understanding and inspire you to dust off your knitting needles or put your hand in your pocket. Please click on the donate button on the right hand side of this page or click here to donate anything that you can. Thank you.

Knitted Hats & Blankets

It was when I was sat on the edge of the operating table getting my spinal injection that my eyes first fell on the baby resuscitation station in the corner of the room. It had a single, tiny white knitted hat laying in the centre of it and I couldn't take my eyes off it. I asked the nurse where it came from, I didn't bring any knitted hats with me. She told me that it was donated, that there are people out there who knit items for babies of all gestation's and donate them to the maternity ward. That little white hat was the first item of clothing Hallie ever wore. It's in all her photographs. She wore it for the duration of her life and after her death and it's one of our most treasured possessions. We keep it beside our bed in our memory box alongside all the knitted blankets that were kindly donated too. For the first few weeks I would cry into that little hat. It still smells of her. She looked so cosy in it, even though it was still far too big for her regardless of how tiny it is. It probably didn't take whoever knitted it very long to make but it means so much to us and we will keep that little hat forever.

Cold Cot/Cuddle Cot

After Hallie was born, it didn't really occur to me that we didn't have anywhere to put her! She was placed on my chest as soon as she was wrapped up and I didn't really consider that I would need to set her down at some point. About an hour after she was born our Midwife offered to weigh her for us (2lbs 4oz!) and dress her in one of the little outfits we had bought for her (from the premature baby section in ASDA Living would you believe - I didn't even know such a section existed until I frantically Googled "where to buy clothes for premature babies nearby" and yep, they were still too big for her!)

Once Hallie was dressed and handed to her Daddy for a cuddle, the Midwife shuffled back into the room with a tiny little Moses basket. Honestly, I was convinced that it was from Toys R Us. She sat it next to my bed and placed all Hallie's blankets inside it and explained that there was a layer underneath the blankets (a bit like an electric blanket) that was hooked up to a pump hidden underneath the bed that would keep the inside of the basket slightly cooler than room temperature. She didn't need to explain to me any further, I already figured out that this was to keep her little body cool when she eventually passed away in order to slow down any deterioration. A sad but true fact.

Once Hallie had passed away, it didn't take long for her little facial features to change. I didn't realise how dramatic the changes were until I looked back at photographs when we got home from the hospital. This was because her face was the warmest part of her body when she lay in the cold cot - there was always someone stroking her little face or giving her tiny kisses on her cheeks and forehead (and Michael giving her little nose rubs/Eskimo kisses) that probably kept her face a bit warmer than the rest of her body. The cold cot really did its job and the rest of Hallie's little body was perfectly preserved in all it's tiny, perfectly chubby pinkness for the duration of our stay. It's such an important piece of equipment for giving bereaved parents precious time with their babies. I know that it's hard to imagine spending time with a baby that has passed away unless you're in that position, but it's honestly incredibly comforting to have them close to you. Our cold cot enabled us to spend just under 3 days with her. In that time our family were able to meet her and we were able to dress her every day and hold/kiss/hug her anytime that we wanted without having to worry about her body becoming too fragile to be handled. That's a huge thing for any grieving family.

Memory Box

Throughout my research in the lead up to Hallie's birth I had seen countless photographs of little ink hand prints and clay castings of tiny feet and wondered where they got such kits from. I'd thought about ordering them on eBay just in case but never got round to it. I remember panicking slightly when I was told that I was in labour because I hadn't brought any thing with me to create the memories with Hallie that I had imagined myself making. When the midwife brought in the cold cot an hour or two after Hallie was born, she also handed Michael a beautiful memory box. I didn't pay much attention to it until the next day but I was blown away when I did find the time to look through it. Questions like "Where did this box come from?" and "Do we have to pay for it?" ran through my head immediately. It had everything - kits to make both ink and clay impressions of Hallie's hands and feet, a copy of Guess How Much I Love You to read to her, lots of little keepsakes like balloons, Forget-Me-Not seeds, a glass angel figurine and even a memory card to encourage us to take as many photographs as we could. There was also a card from a couple called Kirsty and Michael who had lost their son Louis in December 2009 and created and donated this memory box in his memory.

The memory box was an incredibly useful tool in communication with our medical team. The midwives were great in making Hallie's prints for us, really taking the time to get the best prints that they could - not an easy feat with such tiny feet! Michael read Guess How Much I Love You to Hallie every night before we went to sleep and once more as we were preparing to say our goodbyes. The box had two identical teddy bears inside which we kept with Hallie in her Moses basket during our time with her and when we had to leave we took one of the bears with us and one stayed with her. We plan to light the candle on her first birthday and plant the Forget Me Not seeds underneath Hallie's rosebush. There is a "Message to Heaven" balloon which we might release on her birthday too. So many lovely memories made and most importantly, physical things to hold onto. Leaving the hospital with a memory box instead of a baby was incredibly heartbreaking for us but it would have been even worse to leave completely empty handed, as so many couples do.

Thanks to 4Louis we have physical evidence that our baby existed; that we are parents. While we cannot show off our baby in the traditional ways, we can show the items in the memory box to anyone who wants to see them. We are more than happy to show the contents to anyone who asks and I'd actively encourage you to ask the same for any bereaved parent. The worst thing that can happen is they refuse or aren't ready to show you just yet- but I can guarantee you that most will be all too happy to show off their memories with their little one. For us, our memory box is everything we have left of our daughter. It houses all her little belongings - her blankets, hats, outfits and even her little hospital bracelet. If there was ever a house-fire, the memory box would be the first thing that we would rescue.

These three items are the main focus of our fundraising at this moment in time. They seem like a great place to start. The memory boxes cost only £30 to create and sponsor. If 6 people are able to donate just £5 then that equips one grieving couple with a box full of precious memories during one of the hardest, most traumatic events that any family can ever go through. I hope that you feel inspired enough to donate that £5 or even dig deeper to sponsor an entire box yourself (that would be amazing!) because this isn't just another faceless charity. It has been created by and for bereaved families. 4Louis completely relies on the funds raised by other bereaved parents to provide these items and Michael and I have experienced first hand how special and important a charity they are. Every penny goes towards the memory boxes and cuddle cots and providing support to families who are going through baby loss.

Not every hospital has a Bereavement Suite. There are women out there, right now, giving birth to their incredibly ill or still born babies in maternity wards all around the UK, surrounded by healthy newborn babies and celebrating families. I thank my lucky stars that we didn't have to experience that. No family should ever experience that. But they do. 1 in 4 pregnancies end in prenatal or neonatal death in the UK. And Bereavement Suites are still a relatively new concept. I can hand-on-my-heart tell you that I wouldn't be coping as well as I am without having access to the Bereavement Suite in the Ulster Hospital. We are not the first couple to stay there and we certainly won't be the last. In fact, the midwives told me that it wouldn't be long until it was occupied again after we left.

I can't express enough how common miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death is. It's a world to which we all put our fingers in our ears and pretend doesn't exist until we find ourselves or someone we love thrown into the middle of it. But no more - the silence must be and is being broken on this subject. It's not a matter of scaring, its a matter of preparing. All too many women find themselves uneducated and unprepared when the worst happens in their pregnancies. The most common questions I find popping up again and again from Mothers like me is "How did we not know that this could happen? How did we not know how common this was? Why had no one prepared us for this?" Because it DOES happen. It happened to me, twice. And it's happened to friends, family, work colleagues, acquaintances and hundreds of other women I have met online since.

If, by doing this, we can ease just one more family's pain, then it will all be worth it. There are couples all over the UK, all over the world that need us to hold their hands right now - and in Hallie's memory and in memory of all the babies that have been lost and will be lost in similar circumstances, that's exactly what we intend to do.