After a difficult pregnancy and weeks with her newborn in the NICU, this local mom aims to give back with Love From Liam

By Dan England

At night, when the kids are in bed, Nicole Cox crochets a blanket and thinks about the others who are going through what she went through.  

They are probably sitting in a dark room, either holding their fragile babies or watching them sleep, praying they will grow and get strong and healthy. They may be hungry but don’t want to leave. They may be bored or stressed because they don’t know if their baby will make it. Cox wants them to know someone is thinking about them. 

“It’s become my passion,” said Cox, 32. 

 Nicole Cox looks through the trunk of bags she has ready for parents in the NICU at North Colorado Medical Center. Photo by Dan England.

She has her own story, of course, but since Liam is now 8 months old and asleep, let’s focus on that passion first.

Cox calls her new organization Love From Liam, and it’s already done a little bit of good. Cox gathers things she wished she had while she sat by Liam’s incubator in the NICU at North Colorado Medical Center, a place where babies born early, just like Liam, stay until they are strong enough to go home.

These things are self-care items such as snacks, hair ties and stress balls; items to cure boredom such as adult coloring books; and things no one would have thought of unless they were there, such as a long charging cord for their phone, an insulated bag to keep mom’s milk cold while she travels to the hospital and a card they can write to the next family. She keeps these bags in a trunk in Liam’s room in the Evans home she shares with her husband, Matt, 33. They are both teachers working online, Matt for middle schoolers and Nicole for first-graders. 

Nicole already had a heart for this sort of thing: She adopted a former student of hers with special needs and cancer after she was removed from her home, Nicole said. She is now nearly 12. Her first child, a daughter, was born two weeks later, quickly transforming their house from quiet to chaos. She is nearly 3. Those two complicated things when, at 34 weeks, she couldn’t wear shoes over her swollen feet, so she had to teach barefoot.

She knew nothing about pregnancy complications because she’d never had them. When she developed a severe headache and her stomach hurt, she went to the ER, not bothering to pack a bag because no doctor would induce her at 34 weeks. Well, they did, and Liam came out a bit over 3 pounds, as big as her hand. 

“He was such a tiny little guy,” Nicole said.

She got 30 minutes with him, and then they wheeled him away to the NICU, just as COVID-19 began to hit hospitals.

“Leaving the hospital without him was the hardest thing,” Nicole said. “It’s the most unnatural thing to experience. I struggled with everything.”

Indeed, she struggled when she was at home, thinking about Liam, and she struggled during the many hours she was there with him in his room, thinking about her two daughters back at home. She sat with him during the day, with the girls, and then, at night, after dinner and some family time to give the girls a bit of normalcy, a babysitter came over at 11 p.m. and then they would head back over to be with Liam.

When Nicole finally did bring him home, she needed a way to process all that grief, and she thought of Love for Liam after reading about another organization in Idaho. She contacted moms on Facebook and asked them what they would have wanted in a NICU during their experiences. People started donating. 

Nicole Cox is comforted by NICU nurses Chris Holt and Melissa Smith after becoming emotional about her son’s NICU stay. Courtesy photo.

“ALL of it was donated,” Nicole said in wonder. “Just random people, even giving us money that we could use to purchase other things. There’s just so much stuff in those bags now.”

Her goal is to provide every family with a baby born at 36 weeks or sooner with a bag. She even has a nut-free snack option. She hasn’t met a family yet because of COVID-19 restrictions, but she heard from the nurses that the other families really appreciated it. She now knows how to make blankets, and so does her oldest, who wants to help pack the bags. Eventually, she hopes to have a system going, where she can drop off bags every week and make special stops if they run out and a family needs one. 

She made her first drop two weeks ago. It was heartwarming, she said, but also hard. She cried and hugged the masked NICU nurses. She could picture herself walking those halls again. But it brought her a little comfort knowing that she made it a tiny bit easier for parents now doing the same. 

To learn more

To learn more, go to Love From Liam on Facebook to donate or purchase items from Amazon on a wish list.