Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.

I love sharing my story. It's endlessly healing. -Ben Vereen

People who have been in our situation before, have said over and over again that the hardest part of this whole experience is leaving the hospital empty handed. The recommendation is to take a bear or stuffed animal to carry out with you. When I heard this, the wheels in my head started spinning and I thought of going to Build - A - Bear. There we could put the sound of our baby's heartbeat inside a bear that we could then carry with us, snuggle with, and cherish forever.

After hearing what we were planning to do, Sara - a friend and co-worker of Derrick's, sent home a gift certificate to the Workshop. What an amazing gift. She will never know how much that meant to us...

Build - A - Bear  (Mall of America)

Today we took a trip to the Build-A-Bear Workshop at the Mall of America.  With us, we took the recording we captured of Gabriel's heartbeat via ultrasound...

First up was the duty of selecting which bear we would want... I wanted something simple, nothing extreme, just a standard bear.

Next up, I pulled the recorded heartbeat on my phone and recorded it into the sound machine so we could put it in the bear.  I was surprised at how clear the recording came out since it was fairly quiet on my phone.

Evelyn selecting the hearts for our bears

After rubbing the heart with love, prayers, wishes, and happy thoughts we put the heart inside the bear.

Then helped press the pedal while they filled it with stuffing...

Evelyn and Gabriel got matching bears from my mom, one to be with Gabriel forever and one for Evelyn to always remember....

(She liked the cotton machine)

It was important for me to have this bear, something I could keep forever with his heartbeat forever inside it to listen to whenever I feel I want to.  Every medical professional who I told I was going to do this, said they never heard of doing that before and what a great idea that is... I have encouraged all of them to share this with other parents who are going through a similar situation.   So please, feel free to share this idea, hopefully you won't ever have to.



Here is the final product... a bear that will forever carry with it a bit of Gabriel's short but very special life....