Huggable Hearts has a new Give A Little page please follow this link: https://givealittle.co.nz/org/huggableheartsnz#

Huggable Hearts is a free service offered to parents and families who have had an angel baby and would like something tangible to hold and cuddle and help through the grief process for their little one.

It is a free service and that is why we need the public's help. Our hearts are made from fabrics and filled with rice and wheat to the baby's weight and we fund this mainly ourselves.

Please help us keep our service going, our hearts are an important thing for families, they help with grief and we know they provide comfort and I am so glad that our hearts can help bring a little comfort to other parents in a small way.

My story:

My name is Andrea and onJuly 18th 2014 at 7.15pm I gave birth to my beautiful 1st born Amber.

She was born sleeping as lost her fight to Turner syndrome at 19weeks inutero. She was a teeny 100g and 10cm long and I did not get to spend much time with her due to her being so small and fragile.

My grief and my husbands grief was unbearable. We didn't know what to do with ourselves for a few weeks. And because all of our dreams and hopes we had for Amber were now broken, it made things harder as we didn't have many memories to create of her.

Over the next few months I threw myself into creating memories for our beautiful first born. This ranged from jewellery to shoes, to pictures and to toys. Anything I could think of to frantically create happy memories of our child.

One of my items that really stood out was a doll I got made to Ambers weight and height. This became a huge part of helping myself and my hubby work through our grief, it provides us with a comfort we never knew existed and this doll got carried around everywhere for a while.

This inspired me to look into items that I could make to provide to other parents. I found lots of weighted items over in the states and one place provided weighted hearts. I thought this was a fantastic idea & a little easier than making dolls or blankets so I contacted them for advice and to see if it was ok for me to start making these here. They sadly have stopped making them over there now but were kind enough to share with me tips that they have acquired with making these over the years.

Over Christmas 2014 I met CJ in Angel Casts driveway while picking up Ambers foot cast for my Christmas tree decoration. Her baby girl peanut was born a couple of weeks after Amber at 30weeks. We formed a small bond and from there Huggable Hearts was born.

Huggable Hearts has been running since February 2015 and the demand has been huge. CJ has now stepped back with the running of Huggable Hearts as she had her beautiful rainbow baby Nixon in October 15 so Huggable Hearts is now a family run charity with my husband Nathan & my mum Christine on board.

The three of us work full time at other jobs so all of our spare time goes into the making of our hearts. We now also have an amazing small team of sewers on board also to help make our heart forms ready for filling.

Unfortunately though our funds are running low and we have not been able to source suppliers yet to help ease things a little with our resources needed so here we are again, appealing to the community for a little help.

Fabric, Rice, wheat, polyfill, packaging, postage and labels are what we will always need, If you would like to donate in any other way you can contact us via our facebook page or by emailing us through huggablehearts1@gmail.com.

Thank you for reading our page and for anyone that has donated we thank you from the bottom of our hearts xxx