The power of kindness
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- August
- 2
When we became new parents, we were blessed to receive emotional support, many gifts and all sorts of help from family and friends. What was so surprising and wonderful was how Pumpkin inspired acts of kindness in strangers — as we found out last summer during a heat wave very similar to this week’s.
Just about a year ago, temperatures were also in the high 90s. With the heat came a blackout for parts of the Lower Hudson Valley, including my home.
The power went off at 5 p.m. on July 27 — a date that’s special in my family for being my daughter’s due date. But Pumpkin had already come into the world three months earlier at the beginning of May.
She weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces, when she was born. On the night of the blackout, she had been home from the hospital about three weeks. She had already tripled her birth weight to 5 pounds, 8 ounces. I believe a big reason for her healthy growth was receiving breast milk, which I had pumped while she spent nine weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit at White Plains Hospital Center.
By 8 p.m., I was a bit frantic about the 70-plus bottles of breast milk I had stored in my freezer. It was irreplaceable because I didn’t think my supply would increase from the modest amount I was producing. Just that day, for instance, I fed Pumpkin in part on milk I had expressed on May 12.
My husband, who was stuck at work in New York City, called NYSEG to ask when the power would be back on. The answer was 3:30 a.m. The representative also said there was nothing the utility could do to help us.
Then my husband called our local fire department and told them about Pumpkin and how as a preemie, she needed that breast milk. Within minutes, the fire chief was at our house. Within a half hour, he and his crew had set up a portable generator on the patio and moved the fridge so that it could be plugged in through the window.
The fire chief told me he sympathized with our predicament in particular because he had a 5-month-old baby of his own. His son, who weighed 8.5 pounds at birth, was a whopping 19 pounds on that July 27.
A year later, I don’t mind the heat wave because it brings sweet memories of that night, sweltering in the glow of a flashlight with Pumpkin on my lap, serenaded by the hum of a generator keeping my milk safe for my baby to drink another day.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 5:00 am by Julie Moran Alterio.
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