Hospital Recliner for the NICU at RWH in Melbourne

As all of our friends and family know, our girls Toni and Poppy have now been in hospital for well over 4 months.

During those first few weeks and months, we were unable to simply pick up our babies when we wanted to.

Because they had many cords and tubes for their oxygen, monitoring and medications, we would need to have them placed on our chest by the nurses. However to hold our tiny, premature babies, we needed to be lying down in one of the hospital grade recliners that the NICU have.

These recliners were utilised by all the parents in the NICU (there are over 60 babies) which meant they were in high demand, especially on weekends when almost all of the parents would be in visiting their baby.

There were many times where there wasn’t a spare recliner available, which meant we weren’t able to hold our girls until one later became free.

Being twin parents, if we wanted to hold one twin each, this meant we needed two recliners, which was always a very tricky thing to make happen due to the short supply of recliners.

Even now that we are able to pick up our girls ourselves, there’s nothing better than settling down in a comfy chair, reclining back and cuddling your baby, something we would be able to do endlessly if we were home.

As we slowly come to the end of our NICU journey (still a few weeks to go) we are so grateful for all of the times we were able to have skin to skin contact, sometimes even a nap, with our girls in a recliner.

We will soon leave the NICU and begin our lives at home, but while we get to do that, there are and always will be new parents of sick and premature babies who are just at the start of their journeys.

We have spent a lot of time thinking how can we give back to the NICU who literally saved our girls lives and one of the first things that came to mind is providing one or two extra recliners for the future families of the NICU, so they can hold, do skin to skin contact and create bonds with their babies.

We’re hoping to raise $1700 to provide the Royal Womens Hospital in Melbourne with an additional hospital grade recliner, designed and made by CareLeda, so that it might be just that little bit easier for parents in the NICU to hold their tiny babies.

We would absolutely love for our family and friends to get behind us show us their support by donating to help us make this happen.

CareLeda have also stated they will be able to create an engraved plaque, to attach to the recliner so that everyone knows it was Toni and Poppys family and friends who made it happen.