Four nurses noticed the kids nobody else was thinking about – and gave them something to hold onto.
When a newborn is fighting for life in intensive care, the brothers and sisters at home can get lost in the shuffle.
But four nurses at Connecticut Children’s Hospital set out to fix that.
They made a coloring book – “A Message to My Sibling” – built just for those left-behind kids.
A NICU stay can drag on for weeks or months. And the little ones at home often don’t get it, asking parents why mom and dad are always gone and their sibling can’t come home.
Worse, they often can’t even visit, thanks to their age and infection rules.
So the book grew out of what the nurses saw – including one family driving long distances to see their daughter, Anna, born at 31 weeks and weighing just 2 pounds, 13 ounces.
Over years, the nurses worked with illustrator Cheri Lenhow to explain the scary-looking machines without the scare – and have now published it.
“It was really about introducing these things without scaring them, because it can be scary to see this equipment,” Lenhow told WTNH.
There are pages to color and space for big siblings to write notes and draw pictures for the baby. Some of it doesn’t stay home.
“We included pages where they can draw pics of themselves, or things that they enjoy, and they can hang them up on the walls of the NICU,” Lenhow said.
For the nurses, it was never really about crayons.
“NICU admission doesn’t just affect the baby; it affects the entire family,” nurse Kelsey MarcAurele said.
Now the unit’s walls are covered in crayon drawings from kids who can’t visit yet – notes sent ahead to a sibling they can’t wait to meet.
