Christmas Overboard - Err, I Mean Overview (Part I-ELBW)

Ah, the big holiday.  The one that really gets to people, Christmas.  Having your baby in the NICU instead of home with you, can be really difficult.  No one wants to celebrate Christmas in the NICU, including the staff.  Morale seems to fall in December.

It's hard for us too.  We want to spend Christmas with our families.  There are always a few of us that are celebrating a "First Christmas" with our little ones or a "Last Christmas" with sick family members.  We try, we really do, to keep the Christmas spirit alive in the NICU.  We know it's hard for you.  So, what do we do, we CRAFT, of course. :)

First, let me describe our NICU to you.  We have 6 specialized rooms: ELBW (extremely low birth weight), VLBW (very low birth weight), SURGICAL (yup, babies that need some kind of surgical interventions), GENERAL (heart and everything else), & two step down rooms.  At Christmas, we like to decorate the doors to our rooms.  And yes, this is one of my favorite things and I usually go way overboard with the amount of work!  This year, I couldn't be happier with my creation!

ELVES

This time I used the Create a Friend Cricut cartridge and man, was I way over my head.  the super cute female Elf was adorable and perfect for our door decorations.  I was feeling so inspired with it, I even did a "sneak peek" preview on facebook!

And then I started to put them all together.   16 individual pieces....so much time, but so worth it.  In the end, I didn't put the snowballs on the hats and shoes, so it ended up being 13 pieces per elf.  Then, of course, I had to give them each one of our names, so I cut out little tags and one of our ELBW nurses wrote every one's name (b/c I hate my own handwriting).

I couldn't be happier with our door creation this year!