Kerri Murawski and her daughter Delainee are on a mission to help hospitalized children: one pillow at a time.
Inspired by her own surgeries and hospitalization, 17-year-old Delainee and her mother have worked together to create pillows and donate them to children’s hospitals in Virginia, D.C., Louisville, and Kentucky. This helps bring comfort to other children going through a difficult time. Currently, they are both working to craft 100 pillows for the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughter before Halloween, their first round of pillows since the COVID-19 pandemic.
During a Sept. 18 interview, Murawski and Delainee both had a chance to talk about their work of making pillows to help others. Murawski says it all started when then four-year-old Delainee had a sudden cardiac arrest, which led her to spend “about a month” in the hospital.
“She had two surgeries at that point, and when we finally got to leave, the nurse told us that I should put a pillow between her car seat straps and her incision so that she was comfortable on the way home. So I can sew, so I went home and I made a pillow, because I thought, ‘Well, a giant pillow isn’t gonna fit in a car seat,’” Murawski said with a laugh. “So I went home, I made a small pillow and I brought it back to the hospital. So when she was released, we put it between her car seat and her abdomen and, I guess she was comfortable. She didn’t complain.”