A Pittsburgh NICU Nurse Made More Than 80 Tiny Halloween Costumes With Help From Her Mom and Friends, So Baby Ezra Schmiech’s Big Sister Got to See Him Dressed as Elmo

“Baby Elmo, baby Elmo.” That was what Ezra Schmiech’s older sister kept repeating after she met her newborn brother, a premature baby being cared for in the neonatal intensive care unit at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh. Ezra’s Elmo costume was one of more than 80 handmade outfits that NICU nurse Riley Smolsky put together for the unit’s babies this Halloween, with help from her mom and friends, Live Action News reported, citing Pittsburgh station WTAE.

For families who expected to spend a first Halloween at home, the costumes turned a hospital week into something closer to a family photo day.

A Big Sister Who Loves Elmo

Parents David and Megan Schmiech told WTAE that their newborn preemie was wearing the Elmo costume, and the choice was not random. Their daughter, Ezra’s big sister, is a devoted Elmo fan.

The couple told the station that Ezra’s older sister is “obsessed with Elmo,” and that when she got to meet her brother the day before, she kept saying, “Baby Elmo, baby Elmo.” They said they were really excited for him to be dressed up as Elmo for his Halloween in the hospital.

The Schmiechs did not share how early Ezra arrived or how long he is expected to stay in the unit. What they did share was the moment their two children met, with a familiar red character as the bridge between a big sister’s favorite show and a hospital nursery.

Riley Smolsky’s Sewing Project for a Full Unit

Smolsky is a registered nurse who has worked in the Magee-Womens NICU for nearly six years, WPXI-TV reported. The station said she set out to make an outfit for every baby in the unit, sized to fit each one and planned so twins could match.

Smolsky told WPXI she wanted the costumes “to fit right” and to “give the families a great photo op for Halloween.” Her main goal was simple, she said: she mostly wanted to make everybody smile.

She did not do it alone. Friends and family pitched in, and WPXI reported that the Duquesne Women’s Club Soccer Team also helped craft the costumes. The babies wore them on Wednesday, Oct. 28, and the station published a photo gallery of the tiny patients in their outfits that evening.

Speaking about the families who spend long days at their babies’ bedsides, Smolsky put the purpose plainly in her WTAE interview, saying that projects like this one maybe make “their dark days a little bit brighter.”

Sidney Crosby, Bob Ross and a Hot Dog

Many of the costumes leaned hard into Pittsburgh. According to WPXI, the lineup included Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, Heinz ketchup and mustard, painter Bob Ross, a pumpkin spice latte, peas in a pod, and peanut butter and jelly.

One of the babies, Owen, went as a hot dog. His moms, Sara and Zoe Kreinberg, said the staff made his first Halloween special. Sara Kreinberg told the station the family was “so thankful for the team here” for helping them celebrate.

That was the point Smolsky described: a costume that fits and a photo that looks like any other family’s Halloween picture, taken in a unit where most days are measured in feedings and weigh-ins.

One of Pennsylvania’s Largest NICUs

The scale of Smolsky’s project reflects the size of the unit she works in. UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital’s NICU is a Level III unit with 83 beds, including 48 private bays and three open-bay pods, and admits about 1,900 babies a year, according to UPMC. The health system describes it as one of the largest in Pennsylvania.

More than 10,000 babies are born at Magee each year, about 45% of all births in Allegheny County, the hospital says. Its NICU cares for more than 1,500 severely or critically ill babies a year. The unit offers bedside sleep chairs for parents, breastfeeding consultants and a dedicated social work team, and families who travel from outside Pittsburgh can stay at the nearby Family House.

Many of the babies in a unit like this one were born early. About 1 in 10 babies in the United States is born preterm, meaning before 37 weeks of pregnancy, according to the March of Dimes. Some need weeks or months of care before they can breathe on their own, feed by mouth and hold their body temperature.

The national picture has not improved much. The U.S. preterm birth rate was 10.4% in 2024, and the country again earned a D+ grade on the March of Dimes 2025 report card.

Costume Days in NICUs Across the Country

Pittsburgh was not the only hospital where nurses and volunteers spent October sewing for patients who weigh a few pounds. In Detroit, volunteer Valerie Atkinson has spent nine years knitting costumes for the Henry Ford Hospital NICU, including pumpkins, ghosts and twin Frankensteins, Live Action News reported. At VCU Children’s Hospital in Richmond, a team of NICU nurses has made storybook costumes together every year since 2018, including Corduroy, the 101 Dalmatians and Rainbow Fish.

Readers who followed baby Quinn Hackett’s months in the NICU after her birth at 25 weeks know how long those stays can stretch, and how much a small normal moment can mean to the parents living through one.

For the Schmiech family, that moment was a big sister meeting her baby brother and deciding, on the spot, that he was Elmo. His first Halloween came with a costume made by a nurse in his own unit and a big sister who already had a name for him.

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: Cbaile19 – CC0/Wikimedia Commons