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Boston Medical Center NICU babies dress up for Halloween — see the adorable photos
Boston Medical Center’s “tiny but mighty” neonatal intensive care unit is getting festive this Halloween thanks to help from a national non-profit.
Boston Medical Center’s “tiny but mighty” neonatal intensive care unit is getting festive this Halloween thanks to help from a national non-profit.
Project Sweet Peas is a volunteer-run non-profit organization with 15 chapters across the country. It provides support to families of premature or sick infants in the NICU, as well those impacted by pregnancy or infant loss.
The organization’s Southern New England chapter provides support, care packages, and donations to around 12 hospitals in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, the chapter’s division coordinator Peg Ricardo told Boston.com in an interview.
For Halloween, the organization has specific volunteers – affectionately called “Halloween magic-makers,” Ricardo said – that create hundreds of costumes year round. Because babies in the NICU are often too fragile or small to be dressed up in store-bought costumes, the volunteers make the costumes out of flat pieces of fabric to lay over the baby.
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“We’re really not disturbing their rest, but they can still be a little festive,” Ricardo said.
This year, NICU babies at Boston Medical Center were dressed in an array of costumes, such as a mermaid, a superhero, and even a Celtics player. The costumes aren’t just a way to celebrate holidays and annual events; they’re also a way to help ease the stress that families of NICU babies experience.
“They have this fragile infant in the hospital that they can’t bring home yet, and they’re probably still recovering themselves, so it’s just a little bit of fun in the day and is so healing and inspiring for them,” Ricardo said.
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Below, see some of the Halloween costumes babies at Boston Medical Center’s NICU are wearing this year.
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