Shay’s Cuddle Cot
Since the second I found out that the Cuddle Cot I was able to use with Shaylyn was donated by another loss mother and her family, it became my mission to someday be able to do the same. It took me much longer to even get to a point of action than it had for Amy, Landon’s mama. I, to this day, do not know how she did that in those beginning depths of grief. That woman is a superhero. For my fundraiser I needed a ton of help. I always need help doing hard things, even good hard things, and my sister in law Lisa is always my go to. I am easily bribed with niece and nephew cuddles into actually acting on the things I envision. I know most people wouldn’t think that creating a GoFundMe, collecting money, ordering, and then bringing the unit to a hospital would really be that huge of a deal. However, once you bury a child, everything you do is hard. Another problem I was having is we had started doing secret good deeds, sending out little cards, or just little mementoes to other grieving people, but with no fanfare or recognition. I like doing things that way because the point of all of this is not to be recognized for it, but to do these things so that it’s about the person that is on the receiving end and not the giving end. Giving love for the sake of giving love. Also I’m normally a super private person, and I am fiercely protective of Shaylyn. But for this one I had to come out of my comfort zone. We were using a picture and GoFundMe is public. I share pictures and stories and feelings all the time on my own private facebook, but I keep that shit locked down like Fort Knox, so I know who can see what I post. This was much more open than I had ever been and its a very vulnerable place to be. But I sucked up all those feelings and we did it. She typed, I sometimes chimed in with wording while playing with my babies (yes she allows me to call them mine too). She managed the GFM and she did the ordering. She’s like a good deed fairy godmother, this chick, I swear. Anyways Flexmort Cuddle Cots, which are the most well known and reliable, are a UK company, and it was COVID so it was a little more complicated than usual. I was hoping that meant we could kinda just drop it and run, but that turned out not to be the case. They had a photographer there and they actually took us into a labor and delivery room where we got to meet with nurses and have a conversation. Now not knocking like the donation people or anything but they had zero clue what a Cuddle Cot is. In reality no one should, and most people who do, learn about them through tragedy. Nurses though, they fucking know. Having them there changed the whole process for me. They know when and why those devices are used. They get it. So it became more comfortable. They took a few pictures and we left. A little while later the main donation guy called me and said they wanted to have a reporter talk to me and my SIL. Now this set off like a chain of panic in me. A couple pictures at the hospital are one thing, an entire article is another. But once I talked with the reporter I felt she would handle this specific type of donation story with the care it deserved. I did not want it to be some feel good article about me and my SIL, we did not do this for us and we did not do this alone. But in the end, it was again something we could all feel proud of. Donating a Cuddle Cot is weird, you donate it hoping on everything that it will never actually have to be used, but knowing that it likely will be. To date this has been the most meaningful donation, not only in the device itself, but in the amount of people who donated and how quickly it all came together and that could only have been done with the assistance of my Shaylyn Pod. These people help me do things because they love me and they love Shaylyn, and that is the exact purpose of this site.
I’m going to share the GFM too, just because I love what my SIL wrote in there. It’s closed, I am not looking for any more donations. https://www.gofundme.com/f/shaylyn039s-grace-the-gift-of-time.
And here is the article, with never ending thanks to Danielle Ray, for writing this and being understanding when I was being super picky about words or wording.
