A Minnesota mom named Lauren Vinje snapped a photo of her daughter only five days after she was born prematurely. Little did Lauren know, the photo would go on to take the Internet by storm.
The adorable snap of Lauren Vinje’s baby, whose name is Freya Vinje, shows the premature infant with a huge smile at only five days old. Within days of being posted on social media, the photo was shared more than 100k times and received more than 285k likes on Facebook, according to ABC News.
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“Our first daughter at five days old. 3 lbs 14 oz (1.7kg), she was happy to be alive!” Vinje wrote in the caption.
“It made me feel really good,” Vinje said. “Under the comments, I read through a lot of the stories and it’s [for] moms to know, especially mom who are going through it now … they don’t have to go through it alone.”
Freya was born on Thanksgiving Day in 2014 to David and Lauren Vinje. During a visit to the doctor on Nov. 25, 2014, Lauren’s doctor informed her that the baby’s heart rate was dropping and that she needed to have the baby.
“In my head, I knew what it was but my doctor was not confirming it,” Lauren Vinje said. “[With] preeclampsia, your body sees the placenta as being a foreign object and it’s almost like your body becomes allergic to it — [that’s] what they told me. If you’re not monitored closely, you’ll lose the baby.”
Two days later, Freya was born.
“I didn’t get to hold her until she was about 5 hours old,” Lauren Vinje said. “David, my husband, got to hold her pretty much right away. They made sure she was able to breathe on her own because with preemies, [doctors] are always worries about lung development.”
Five days after Freya was born, Vinje snapped the photo that would eventually go viral on the Internet.
“I was talking to her and I had said, ‘Should we send a picture to Daddy?’” Vinje said. “And right when I was about to take the picture, she had this huge smile. It was a picture that I had always wanted to get out for people to see because of how it touched me [in] the way that it did. We gave a copy to the nurses, and when we went to have our second little girl, they still had it hanging up in their break room.”
Lauren had no idea that the photo would go on to draw so much attention on social media.
“I showed my husband David, [I said], ‘Look, there’s 2,000 likes!’” she said. “And now, I’ve been seeing it on all of these different sites. I had a feeling it would put some smiles on a few people’s faces.”
Vinje posted the photo on the childbirth blog “Birth Without Fear,” in the hopes that she could give comfort to parents of premature infants.
“Like Lauren had said, when you’re going through it, you don’t know what to expect when it’s your first time having kids,” David Vinje said. “I think [it’s] for people going through this to have that idea of, ‘Oh, there’s other people going through this too.’”
Today, Freya is healthy and will be celebrating her second birthday next month.
“Honestly, she is the best thing that has happened to us,” Lauren Vinje said. “We go to the store and she’s the friendliest little girl and she says hi to everybody. She’s so fun. She’s so happy. That picture at 5 days old, you can see her little personality and you look at her now, and she hasn’t changed. She’s still the happy little girl in that photo.”
We thank the Vinjes for sharing this touching story and posting the heartwarming photo.
[H/T ABC News]
