COLUMBIA, S.C. — Every parent remembers their baby's first picture with Santa. On Friday, babies at the Prisma Health Baptist Hospital got the chance to meet the big guy in red despite being away from home.
Santa and Mrs. Claus visited newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital in downtown Columbia as they celebrated their first holiday season.
"It's great to see the parents involved in their care. You have families that don't typically get to stay with their babies in the NICU, so being able to give them that opportunity here at the Baptist campus is really important to us," Tracie Hendrix, the assistant nurse manager at the Baptist Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), said.
Mikayla Cooks is a first-time mom, and her gift this year came 13 weeks early.
"It feels great. It feels like she's still getting to be a baby. It feels like I'm getting to have those experiences as a first-time mom and first-time holidays," she said. "She's still getting to participate in those things even though, again, it wasn't a normal experience. she's still getting to be a normal baby."
Mikayla's daughter has been in the NICU for the past weeks but will be heading home in the next few days.
"It's meant so much to me that we've gotten this far, and they've made a very long, difficult, exhausting experience so, so amazing. I couldn't imagine it being any better," Cooks said.