Losing a child is the worst possible thing which can happen to a parent. Sadly it occurs in the world every day. Forget-Me-Not stuffed animals try to help heartbroken mothers through the difficult times.
Forget-Me-Not and Sunflower are programs designed to support expecting mothers with high-risk pregnancies, KHQQ6 reported. The director of these programs is nurse Carolyn Ringo who sees first-hand the suffering of mothers who lose their children.
She was there when Jodi Peterson lost one of her twin boys. Jodi was pregnant with twins, Steele and Gage, when she found out that Steele had severe health complications. She gave birth to both of them, but only Gage survived. Steel lived for 63 days in the hospital before he died of leukemia.
Before he passed, his mother made a recording of her baby boy breathing on his ventilator machine. She put that recording device into a teddy bear that she says has saved her time and time again. Jodi says the comfort of hearing her baby boy breathe gave her strength to carry on even after his death.
Seven years later Jodi and Ringo are working together. Jodi, her daughter Hannah, and her son Gage, each hold and cherish a teddy bear with a recording of Jodi’s late son, Steele. Now Jodi and her family are donating stuffed animals and teddy bears to the Sacred Heart’s program and Ringo’s programs.
Ringo says the hope is that the teddy bears will go home with mothers and their newborns. She says that’s often the case. Still, tears come to Jodi’s eyes when she says she knows that often times these teddy bears go home in place of babies. Despite the pain and loss, Jodi hopes to help heal hurting hearts by revealing her own.
Sometimes babies born to those mothers do not survive, and Ringo’s job is to stand by these women through their pain. Part of that includes helping them collect and record every memory of their child, including a Build-A-Bear with their child’s heartbeat inside.
