Fundraising challenge for 2023: London Royal Parks Half Marathon. By taking part in this I hope to raise money for Tommy's, a charity very close to my heart. My target is to raise £350 for this event from now.

Thanks for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page. This page is in memory of our son Jacob who was born sleeping on 14th December 2021. He was stillborn at 31+2 weeks (7 months) and we want to raise awareness and money for Tommy's to help vital research into preventing this happening to anyone in the future. 1 in 200 babies are stillborn in the UK currently, and almost half of these they don't know why it happened.

Jacob is our firstborn, naturally conceived and naturally birthed. All throughout the pregnancy everything was so normal and we never expected anything like this to happen.

At the end of November 2021, Jess had covid and was isolating for 2 weeks. The covid was very mild, but the day after isolation Jess noticed reduced movements. We went into hospital where we were told those dreaded words, 'there's no heartbeat'.

On Tuesday 14th December at 10:33pm our beautiful son was born. It was a sad day but also the best day as we got to meet our baby boy. Jacob was so perfect and quite big! He was 45cm long and weighed 1550g (3 pounds 6 ounces). He had very dark hair so took after Daddy, but had Mummy’s long hands. And his feet were the size of a 34 week baby! So we believe he would have grown up to be tall, dark and handsome.

We got to hold him, take lots of pictures and videos of him. The hospital provided a memory box which helped us make lots of precious memories with him. We made hand and foot prints, have a lock of his hair, we put a diaper on him, dressed him, sang and read to him. We will cherish these memories forever. Some family members also got to meet Jacob and hold him too.

The postmortem showed that covid was found in the placenta, which caused an immune response called CHI. Basically it cut off blood flow to Jacob and he died. What happened with Jacob due to covid is rare (approx 1 in 100 covid pregnancies) and we will never know why us.

We miss Jacob everyday and we will grieve Jacob for the rest of our lives. We are learning to live with this reality and trying to move forward, but we will never 'move on'. He will always be our firstborn baby and our living children have an older brother in heaven. Jacob made us parents. We love talking about him to keep his memory alive and always will. Fundraising is our way of parenting him, which helps bring us some comfort that we are helping save other babies.

We love you always and forever, our precious Kubuś.

Thank you.

Love Jacob's Parents xxx