Congrats, teeny tiny graduates!
Graduation season might be over for schools, but it's still in full swing for neonatal nurse Melissa Jordan and her colleagues at CaroMont Regional Medical Center in Gastonia, North Carolina.
The staff at Birthplace, a birthing and family care center at CaroMont, are doing something very special for some of their youngest patients.
Courtesy of CaroMont Health
The staff has been holding mini ceremonies for babies leaving the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) who were born 6 or more weeks premature.
Newborn babies are admitted to the NICU when they require intensive medical care, which can happen for a number of reasons but often because the baby is born premature or ill. The NICU is staffed by a team of doctors and nurses who take care of the infants until they are healthy enough to go home.
"We make sure these babies are being fed and cared and loved for, and of course that the parents get to bond with them while they're in the NICU," Jordan told BuzzFeed Health. When the babies are finally discharged, Jordan and her staff hold a small graduation ceremony for the baby and their family.
Bella Baby Photography / Via bellababyphotography.com
And the portraits of these grads and their tiny caps are seriously cute...
"When I started the program, I called Bella Baby Photography — they take pictures of all our babies going home — and asked if they could come photograph the NICU grads, and the photographer actually offered to give these pictures to the parents free of charge," Jordan said. Now each family can go home with a graduation portrait of their NICU grad to cherish.
Bella Baby Photography / Via bellababyphotography.com