The hat a newborn baby wears home from the hospital is a forever keepsake for many families. For more than 2,000 babies in Maryland, their keepsake hat was handmade by the same woman, Doris Bender, an 80-year-old grandmother.
Bender, of Sharpsburg, Maryland, began crocheting hats for newborns around three years ago at the suggestion of her daughter as a way to fight boredom in retirement.
“My husband watches the ball games [in the evening] and I needed something to do,” Bender said. “I couldn’t just sit there and watch the ball game when I wasn’t interested in it.”
“[My daughter] said, ‘Why don’t you make hats for newborns?’ and she called and nurse and that’s how we got started,” she recalled.
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Bender’s daughter, Terrie Grim, got in touch with a nurse at a nearby hospital, Meritus Medical Center, which was happy to accept Bender’s handmade creations.
“After that, she hasn’t stopped,” said Grim, who finds patterns for her mom on Pinterest and alerts her when there are sales on yarn at local stores.
Bender said she crochets for around three hours each night and anytime during the day when she “needs a break.”
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“It relaxes me,” said Bender, who learned to crochet during her childhood in Hawaii. “And it’s what keeps me going.”
Bender, a mother of three, retired after working as a barber for 42 years in Sharpsburg. The hats she crochets now likely cover the heads of the children and grandchildren of the people whose hair she used to cut.
At Meritus Medical Center, Bender’s crocheted hats have become a legend of their own.
They are specific for each season, featuring snowmen and reindeer in the winter and the logos of local baseball teams in the spring. The hospital's labor and delivery and special care nursery unit holds as many as 15 babies on a given day, who will each eventually go home with a handmade hat.
“These handmade hats genuinely touch the parents of newborns at Meritus Medical Center and even the nurses who offer them for the babies to wear home and to have as a keepsake once they are grown," Lori Sprecher, clinical manager of the labor and delivery and special care nursery at Meritus Medical Center, said in a statement. "We appreciate Mrs. Bender and the other volunteers in the community who knit these tiny gifts with love.”