February 7-14 is Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) Awareness Week. CHDs are the most common type of birth defect, nearly 1 in 100 babies is born with CHD and about 1 in 4 of those babies has a critical CHD and need surgery or other procedures in the first year of life. More info here
As we haven’t written in a while and to be part of CHD week, here it goes a quick update about a couple of things we have done lately, looking for ways to keep Abby’s memory alive for a long time.
Since Abby passed away we have been considering the idea of getting tattoos, and we finally did it! Sergio got one in the chest, near to his heart, with the little footprints they took on her birth day. And Dessireé got a heart, a heartline and Abby’s name tattooed in her left arm, where people can see it and have a chance to talk more about our baby.
Other idea we had, and is still a work in progress, is related with something we read a while ago, about somebody that, when traveling, he took pictures of this lego figurine in different famous places. We also liked that idea, but never did anything similar and at some point forgot about it.
We like to think Abby loved to travel as well, since the moment she was an embryo, she had to travel by herself from Illinois to Indiana (when we had to transfer our embryos to a different hospital for implantation). Later on, when Dessireé was pregnant, we went to different places and played “geocaching”, which is basically a treasure hunt where people from all over the world, hide little things in random coordinates and anybody can use an app to find them and add their name to the list.
Adding both concepts together, we designed stickers that we are planning to bring always with us to include them in our pictures as memento for Abby. Then, the idea is to paste the sticker partially hidden (without damaging property, nor contaminating!) so that maybe someday somebody find our little treasure and learn about Abby’s story.
Depending on how it goes, we may add a new section here in the blog with the photos and the places in the world where her story has reached.