Give a nanny-Children’s Palliative Care Society and Ziedot.lv project to support parents

It’s a blessing to meet people who can show through their nature, wisdom and sincerity how to accept these challenges, how to coexist with them, and how to live a full life despite them. The Children’s Palliative Care Society supports many families that can teach us about life in a much more profound way, and help us appreciate what is really important, and often forgotten in the hectic rush of everyday life.

Day in and day out, these families care for children, for whom any radical treatment options have been exhausted, in situations when the entire family, all loved ones and friends have to live with the untreatable illness of the child.

There are no two children that are the same, and likewise, all families have different needs. Most of these families lack the reliable support of a nanny who would be present in everyday events at their home and beyond. Families with seriously ill children can’t always afford the services of a nanny, meaning that the help of other people is needed. This need has also been confirmed by a survey conducted by the Children’s Palliative Care Society and the ‘Mēs negribam izdegt!’ (‘We don’t want to burn out!’) parent initiative. The situations, in which a nanny is necessary, are different, but all of them form a part of the day-to-day life of these families:

• When they want to devote some time to themselves or other family members, to gain new strength.
• During the post-operative period, when the parents are exhausted, and need to entrust their child to someone reliable, for an hour, or a day or night, so that they can take a break and recover.
• Being with parents at the major life events of other children: weddings, graduations, birthdays, to give hugs and wish all the best in their future lives.
• Supporting them at the end of the child’s life, when the nanny is present at its home and supports the family at this difficult and at the same time important time.

Thanks to the support of ziedot.lv, we can make the dreams of families come true, and create unforgettable moments. You can contribute your support at https://www.ziedot.lv/auklite-svarigiem-dzives-mirkliem-3945

Since the beginning of the project, the donations have made it possible for 16 families to use the services of a nanny. One of these families’ story of gratitude speaks for itself:

‘Our foster son is a wonderful, cheerful and very active 6-month-old. But he has health problems, and need 24/7 supervision, even when he’s sleeping. Our day-to-day life is tightly planned, because we have three more children of pre-school and primary school age. My husband and I sometimes let each other sleep some more (or simply sleep at all) by taking all of our children to swim, to the cinema, a skating rink, or to the countryside with all of our children: anywhere to let the other half take a break. But having fun together was a luxury we’d been denied for months. Until the SOS nanny! At first when we found out about this opportunity to invite a specialist nanny who you can be sure will take good care of our boy’s special needs, we had doubts in a very Latvian kind of way: “Why us then? Other people have it even worse! We can manage everything after all, just can’t spent some free time together…” But because it was just before the anniversary of our wedding, we decided it’s now or never! We packed up our suitcases and went to a hotel. Yes, very unimaginative, a hotel. With a wonderful dinner, with the sea, with a pool, with silence and massage, without an alarm clock going off every hour and a half or two hours, without the noises of the feeding machine, and with huge plans that we would talk of, dream of, come true that night… And the fact is, we finally slept really well! Sleep actually took over some of our plans for that evening. But the feeling of suddenly waking up without an alarm clock, understanding that the night before you didn’t even have the energy to check what channels the hotel TV has, and waking up your husband to go have a breakfast with champagne, breakfast clearly that clearly someone else has made for you, is just wonderful! Without the SOS nanny, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything like this for a long time.

Being able to devote some time to yourself and recover your energy is a huge benefit of the project.’