WEST READING, Pa. – A special reunion was held Sunday in West Reading to celebrate the strength and resilience of Reading Hospital’s NICU patients and their families.<\/p>\n
It was chance for nurses and families to celebrate how far their little ones have come.<\/p>\n
The room filled with miracles, babies born very early.<\/p>\n
“They each weighed 3 pounds.” said Caitlyn Girard, a mom of twin who stayed in the Reading Hospital NICU for over seven weeks.<\/p>\n
“I remember the first day there,” said Girard. “We were a mess and the nurse came up and rubbed my back and said it’s going to be OK.”<\/p>\n
Girard’s twin boys were born 10 weeks early, but you wouldn’t know it now.<\/p>\n
“Now they’re in second grade,” she said. “They are best friends, they do all the sports: football, wrestling, baseball. They love to swim a lot and going on vacation.”<\/p>\n
More importantly, it was a chance to reconnect with the nurses who became family.<\/p>\n
“We’re really proud of our graduates and their families because it’s just a huge life milestone to overcome the NICU and see how much they’ve grown since then,” said NICU director, Melanie Jimenez.<\/p>\n
The Reading Hospital said the idea for the reunion came from the nurses themselves. Now, it’s a tradition they and the families they helped look forward to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WEST READING, Pa. – A special reunion was held Sunday in West Reading to celebrate the strength and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":["post-170526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}