GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A Rockford mom, Kirsten Pipp, has spent the last three months preparing to make a special donation to Helen Devos Children's Hospital, inspired by her 11-month-old son, Roy.
At less than a year old, Roy has an extra accessory on his little face that sets him apart. “To know he was going to need glasses as an infant, and for his entire life, essentially, was hard for us," Pipp said. “Now, we couldn't imagine him without them.”
Roy has been wearing glasses since he was five months old.
“He was born with a couple abnormalities that we didn't know about until he was born, and one of those was a cyst on his eye,” Pipp said.
Doctors at Helen Devos Children’s Hospital have cared for Roy since birth, informing his parents that he would need to wear a patch on his eye for two hours a day. “Having a newborn, but also patching a newborn for two hours a day, was a bit of a learning curve for us.”
Now, at 11 months old, Roy needs to wear the patch for four hours a day to make sure his brain is utilizing his eye with poor vision.
Pipp and her husband decided they wanted to do something to make Roy feel less alone, so when Roy got glasses, so did they. "The glasses I'm wearing are fake," Pipp said. "I wear them for him, so that I look like him.”
This inspired Pipp's idea to sew mini pairs of glasses onto teddy bears. "I thought, what can we do for other kids getting glasses for the first time?”
With a little help over the last three months, Pipp sewed 100 pairs of glasses onto 100 teddy bears to donate to Roy’s ophthalmology clinic at Helen Devos Children's Hospital.
So, any kid who needs glasses will also get “…a teddy bear with glasses that look like them, so that they can feel less alone,” Pipp said.
These kids and their parents will now be left with a permanent reminder that others look like them, too.
"I know that it'll not only make a child smile to receive a bear with glasses, but I think it'll touch the parents as well, and that makes my heart happy as a mom,” Pipp said.
Roy is scheduled to have eye surgery in January to shave down the cyst on his eye, but he remains a happy baby.
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