Have You Ever Seen Purple Butterflies By A Newborn Baby? They Have An Important Meaning (Photos)

Keep your eye out for a purple butterfly logo on a hospital crib. The colorful butterfly has a special meaning for moms of newborns.

Milli Smith and her partner Lewis Cann were excited to discover they were expecting twins. Their joy, however, was tempered with worry. “We had a couple of weeks of excitement,” Smith explained. “Twins run in my family. However, so far, there has not been a set of twins where both have survived. So I was almost prepared for the worst.”

It turned out that one of the twins had a serious birth defect and didn’t survive. As the couple was grieving and caring for their surviving daughter in the hospital nursery, a passing comment from a stranger left Smith stunned. That’s when she decided she would make an effort to reach out to other families who had suffered this loss.

Various hospitals have different policies, but in this case, since surviving daughter Callie was in the Neonatal ICU, Smith and Cann were camped out at the NICU with a number of other parents.

“None of the other parents knew what had happened or anything about Skye,” Smith noted. “The comment was completely innocent and more out of humor. A parent of twins turned to me, when their babies were crying, and said, ‘You are so lucky you just have one.’ They weren’t to know that I did at one point have two. But the comment nearly broke me. I ran out [of] the room in tears and they had no idea why. I didn’t have the heart to tell them what had happened. A simple sticker would have avoided that entire situation.”

After that chance encounter, Smith began her campaign to place purple butterfly stickers on cribs or beds in hospital nurseries to let everyone know that the baby’s family has lost a sibling.

Source: Babble
Photo: Facebook/The Skye High Foundation