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Making skin-to-skin contact with your baby right after they’re born has been proven to have benefits for both the baby and for the parents. But when 6-year-old Mikey finally got the baby brother he’d been dreaming of, according to People, he became the first sibling in the hospital’s history to be allowed to make skin-to-skin contact. Mikey and baby Jake’s parents posted a video of the new big brother doing skin-to-skin with his newborn baby brother, and it’s clear that these two brothers already have a very special bond.

Mikey’s mother, Jessica Marotta, shared the story of how her family came to be in a blog post for Love What Matters. As she explained in the story, Mikey wanted a baby brother ever since he was 3 years old, and he made that very clear to his parents. In 2016, as she shared on the blog, Jessica and her husband Michael found out they were expecting again. They were so excited to give Mikey a little sibling, but decided to wait until the first trimester was over to tell him. When Jessica was 11 weeks along, in January 2017, according to her post, she had a miscarriage.

“Our hearts were broken,” Jessica wrote in her blog post. “I was 11 weeks and we thought we were just a week away from being able to safely share the news with the others in our lives.”

Jessica decided to send tissue for testing to find out what went wrong with her pregnancy. Over the phone, she found out that she had been pregnant with a boy. On the blog post, she wrote:

Before the OB hung up, I had to know… “Did you find out the sex?,” I asked. She kindly answered, “yes, it was a male.” It took my breath away. Mikey had gotten his baby brother, except now he was our angel baby.

Then, in the summer of 2017, Jessica found out she was pregnant again. She gave birth on March 6, 2018, via an emergency C-section at just 30 weeks along (the ideal length of human gestation is 40 weeks, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information). Her baby boy Jake weighed 1 pound, 12 ounces, as she shared on her blog post, and he measured 12 inches long, which Jessica wrote is the size of a 25-week-old fetus. “I got to see his teeny face for a moment before he was whisked to the NICU,” Jessica wrote. “Once I recovered a bit, I was wheeled on my stretcher to see him and his smallness took my breath away and my eyes filled with tears.”

When Mikey came to the hospital to meet his little brother, it was love at first sight. However, he had to wait a week and a half before he was allowed to hold him. On March 17, Mikey became the first person to do skin-to-skin with a baby sibling at the Beth Israel NICU in Boston, according to Jessica. She wrote:

During one of my daily rounds with Jake’s nurses and doctors on day 10, I asked if Mikey could do skin to skin with his baby brother, fully expecting them to say no. I was beyond thrilled when they agreed! … It was amazing and emotional, and I truly believe became the foundation for their brotherly bond.

Jessica further opened up about the emotional experience between her two sons in an interview with People. “It was very sweet. [Mikey] was very excited … When he started holding Jake he just giggled, it was a nervous giggle,” she told the publication. “He blinked a lot because he was really emotional. It was probably one of the most emotional things I’ve ever seen without a lot of tears because he was so happy at the same time.”

She shared a video to Instagram of the tender moment, and be warned: watching it may cause excessive happy-tears.

Skin-to-skin contact has a variety of benefits. For example, it promotes healthy weight and growth, because the baby doesn’t need to use their own energy to regulate their body temperature, and can use that energy for growing, according to a study published by the Cochrane Library. Additionally, skin-to-skin can help the baby’s brain development, it can reduce the baby’s stress, and it promotes bonding, according to Fit Pregnancy and Baby.

Jessica and Jake spent 62 days in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Now, at nearly 5 months old, baby Jake seems to be doing well — not to mention, his relationship with Mikey is the sweetest thing ever. “Jake has brought a calmness to Mikey … even if Jake’s screaming, Mikey comes over and tries to calm him down, soothe him,” Jessica told People. “He was made to be this big brother.”

Now, Jessica and Michael document their sons’ unbreakable bond on an Instagram page called @themarottabrothers. It’s clear that they are all so happy to be part of their special family of four, and I have no doubt that Mikey and Jake will continue to have an extraordinary bond for the rest of their lives.

Around 4PM every evening, my mood descends perfectly in time with the sun. I am creatively depleted from a day of trying to write, my husband usually still has a few more hours of work to do, and it is almost time to pick my children up from school.

The days are short and cold and I’m indoors with two elementary school-aged children with runny noses. The children seemingly come out from school sick as frequently as they come out not-sick and I will, I worry, forever be anxious when it comes to their health, even in the face of a simple common cold. I spend far too much time online to not catastrophize everything.

They come home happy, though, and putter around, setting up elaborate games, avoiding showers and homework, trying to negotiate some weekday screen time because of the “winter blues” — they’ve heard me speaking, they hear everything.

They need me so much during these hours and I want to give them my all, but my all isn’t what they need. They need just enough of me that I can’t read a book and I certainly cannot work on writing a book. They need just enough of me that I can still sit on the couch and stare at the ceiling in despair.

So I started baking cakes and cupcakes from box mixes. It started when I bought two on a whim, thinking I’d make them someday with the kids, a fun cold day activity. But then I made a box myself one evening, flitting between our open kitchen and the dining table where the children do their homework, explaining multiplication while taking two eggs out of the fridge, returning to help my younger one with phonics while holding my measuring cup for only oil and milk. I discovered, during those difficult few hours when my anxiety peaks and I usually feel 10% of my brain spiraling into a state of blind panic and depression that threatens to overtake the remaining 90%, I can rescue myself by using that 10% to bake things not-from-scratch.

“It’s too cold, it’s too dark. This is what I’m doing. I’m baking.”

Those first two boxes got used up in two days so I put on my snow boots and went back to Whole Foods and bought seven more and our kitchen counters and dining table and fridge and pantry have started filling up with cakes of different sizes and cupcakes of different colors. Our children delight in this obsessive new hobby of their mother’s, resulting in more sugar than they’ve ever been allowed to have.

“I’m putting flaxseed in so it’s not really unhealthy,” I say to my husband when he asks if I maybe want to go and take a walk instead of start stirring another batch of artificially spongey cake mix.

“No!” I shout. “It’s too cold, it’s too dark. This is what I’m doing. I’m baking.”

I play music and the children dance around the living room while I follow the nearly-identical recipes at the back of each box. Some need two eggs, some three. Eggs are expensive, this is becoming an expensive addiction, but I find myself starting to look forward to the dark hours between pick up and bedtime, which feel endless this time of year. I tuck away my creativity but instead of resenting that, I look forward to the mechanical stirring of ingredients that fill the home with the smell of vanilla and chocolate, sometimes pumpkin and cinnamon. I don’t try anything elaborate or new, nothing that would require thinking. It is a meditative act.

The recycling bin fills up with empty boxes. I pack cupcakes for school lunches, I drop some off for our neighbor, being vague about how from-scratch I made them. Sometimes I feel guilty about too much sugar and throw away huge numbers and then feel guilty about wasting food in a world where too many people have too little. Then all that guilt just makes me more anxious so I rush back to Whole Foods and get some more cake mixes.

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