Some of you may know that my husband and I became grandparents last February. Our oldest son and his precious bride-to-be gave birth to fraternal twins weighing @ 2lbs and 10 oz, four days shy of their 28 weeks of gestation. Obviously given how tiny they were, they were to spend till their due-date (May 5) in the NICU.
After many many weeks of prayer, our little miracles were finally able to leave the hospital. During their stay, one of the sweet NICU nurses was sure to keep tabs of their footprints and weight till the day they could finally come home. She would use the back of clinic cards to faithfully and lovingly keep tabs for the busy new mommy and daddy.
Suffice to say, the past year for all of us just got twice as busy. Almost a year later we decided it was finally time to salvage and put together a memory of just how miraculous the whole time in the NICU was for all our family.
Here are pictures of the work the nurse and Brittany (our new mommy) so faithfully logged for the twins. Brittany brought each one of the little footprints carefully placed in two ziploc bags. First thing we did was lay them out over the frame. We needed to figure out how we needed to arrange them, keeping them in order of their weight gain. Given that Noah had to spend more time in the NICU he had more sets of footprints, so we were going to have to figure a way to lay them out in a way it would work. The colors in the nursery were teal/blues and greens. First I decided I would select some pretty colored card stock and use ombre in blues and greens to give the layout a little movement. Noah had been there till his third month and Jax was only there for a little over two…I had to find a way to unify all those sets of footprints in one frame so, instead of using all the different shapes … I started with circles. The next step was a trial run of arranging them the frame. There was so much sentimental value to each and every little figure that was added in, Brittany, wanted to keep the memory of that. There had been one for St. Patty’s Day, Earth day and EVERY DAY, really, that they had to be measured and weighed became a milestone of progress that always cause great joy. In order to include them, I was going to have to make them smaller and add them to the circles I had cut before. One by one I made smaller figures and cut them all out with my small craft scissors.The time came to assemble each and every circle. The little footprints that had been so faithfully taken and carefully laminated were moved to their “new home”. After they were all assembled it was time to add our burlap backing to the mat. I made sure I had enough excess on all sides so I could fold and tape.
It took a couple attempts of arranging and re-arranging, but below is the finished product for both. Framed and unframed. I kept the first and second row the same on both frames, to have some type of unity. Since Noah was there longer, his story he had a little more to share, but the final product is narrated here in this mixture of paper art and burlap, to cherish for years to come.
I hope you have enjoyed my tutorial and hope it inspires you to hope, love, create and pray for those gifts from heaven that temporarily take up residence in the miraculous hospital wings called the NICU.Because our beloved little Chunkies- as I lovingly call them- turn a year next month, I may have some more “crafts” I’ll be blogging about. We ( Brittany and I) have a couple things we plan on doing for such a great celebration. So say tuned for some more fun crafts in the days ahead!