After Hannah and Nick Stenmark’s baby boy, Jett, surprised them by coming three months early, the couple worked together to overcome the challenges and created a book that will help future families at Royal North Shore Hospital.
“Having a premature baby is the last thing you think about,” Nick tells North Shore Living.
“We hadn’t even done any birth classes, or we didn’t have a pram. We didn’t know anything and all of a sudden, Hannah is going into labour.”
After their premature baby, Jett, was born, the Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH) staff recommended one of the best things they could do was talk to the baby while he was in the incubator.
Hannah and Nick’s son, Jett, is now two-years-old and doctors say he is a ‘confident young man’.
“You can cuddle them for two hours a day, but then the rest of the time you can’t hold them. So, they encourage reading because the babies can still hear and, just like if they are in your tummy, they need to be hearing your voice as it helps their neurological pathways develop,” Nick said.
Nick says that, at that time, it was a challenge finding a book that was sensitive to what they were going through, so he started writing a poem on paper as he sat next to the incubator and would read that to baby Jett.
“So, you end up reading The Cat in the Hat or whatever, which is fine, but what you need most as a parent going through that time is optimism and hope and belief that your kid might make it through.”
While they were reading their own written words to baby Jett, they also read the words to the nurses and doctors in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Nick says they were ‘all in tears’ and encouraged the couple to turn the poem into a book.
The book they created is called Your Little Head Start, with the words written by Nick and the beautiful illustrations by Hannah.
There are 600 babies which arrive in the NICU at RNSH every year. As such, Hannah and Nick donated 600 copies of their book so that every child and parent for the next year will have a copy to help them through a difficult time.
“Hannah and I were just watching TV one night and we got this email from a couple at 8.30pm saying, ‘Dear Nick and Hannah, my wife and I are currently in North Shore NICU with twins. They were born at 27 weeks. Thank you so much for the gift. All of the nurses have been saying how great it is. It’s so amazing for us to read to them – so emotional’.”
Jett is now two and a half years old, and Nick says he is doing ‘really well’.
“The psychologist doing the test said, ‘He just seems like a really confident young man who knows his place in the world’, and that is just such a lovely thing to hear because that’s all you want for your child. That really connected with us and made us a bit emotional,” Nick says.
To view or purchase Hannah and Nick’s book, visit yourlittleheadstart.com.