Over two years ago, I got a phone call that changed what I was writing before I even knew it. My twin sister was pregnant. Somewhere between her saying the words and me hanging up the phone, I had already started thinking about a book.
I didn’t yet know this baby would be a NICU graduate, just like me. I just knew I wanted to write something for her. That “something” became “Oodles of Noodles,” but for a long time it just had a message: For Ari.
There is something a little absurd about writing a book for a person who doesn’t exist yet. You don’t know what they’ll look like, or what will make them laugh. All I had was the fact that she’d be my niece, and that felt like enough to me. I’d written novels before, but picture books are a whole new ball game: the economy of words, the attention span. Still, I was ready to start.
Ari’s beginning looked a lot like mine. She came early and spent her first weeks in the NICU, becoming the newest NICU success story in my family.
Before the book was finished, I saw my sister sit at an incubator window and read to her daughter through the glass. The book she read was “Corduroy.” I can’t quite explain what that did to me. My parents raised two NICU graduates of their own, and here she was doing what they once did: showing up and hoping.
My mom said it better than I could: “Our story began in the NICU. I hope this book brings comfort, connection, and a reminder that every tiny beginning holds endless possibilities.”
“Oodles of Noodles” is dedicated to Ari. That wasn’t a marketing decision. It was the whole point.
Ari turned two this year. To celebrate, my family and I donated copies of “Oodles of Noodles” to every NICU family at Golisano Children’s Hospital in the month of July, where our family’s NICU story started.
This project was not always about milestones. It was just me, an aunt, writing for a niece I could not wait to meet.
Leave a Reply