‘She is making everybody smile’: Newborn offers comfort, hope for family who lost everything to wildfires

Brooke Kindel looks down at her five-day-old daughter, Callie. (Brooke Kindel)

Pregnancies can come with complications, but Brooke Kindel never imagined just how complicated her life would get in the weeks leading up to her daughter’s birth.

“We were pretty optimistic that things would be fairly straightforward with our third (baby),” Kindel said. “But obviously our life is not at all what we had initially planned.”

One month ago, the family from Denare Beach, Sask., lost their house and everything inside to the Wolf fire, one of the province’s largest active wildfires burning in the north.

Kindel was 35 weeks pregnant at the time, experiencing symptoms of prodromal labour, or false labour, likely triggered by stress. One of her biggest fears was going into premature labour.

“It’s been some of the most stressful times of our entire life,” she said. “We weren’t fully prepared. But we were better than what we could have been.”

Kindel’s family of five, which now includes two kids under the age of two and a four-year-old, along with her parents, three dogs and a cat, are sharing a four-bedroom rental house in Saskatoon, while they figure out their next steps.

On Thursday, she was sitting at the kitchen table cradling her five-day-old daughter, Callie, who was born only a couple days before Kindel’s scheduled C-section.

The house is quiet – almost peaceful – which she says never happens.

“Usually at least one kid is crying at any given time,” Kindel said.

But her youngest son Logan is down for a nap and four-year-old Jackson is obsessing over his new baby sister. Right now, the tiniest member of the family is the biggest distraction from a challenging reality.

“It definitely is the light at the end of the tunnel … thankfully, she’s a really, really good baby,” Kindel said.

“She is making everybody smile.”

Hundreds of homes were burned in Denare Beach, as the community is unrecognizable.

Kindel’s parents also lost their home next door, the house she grew up in. She hasn’t been back to see the devastation for herself and doesn’t know when she will get there.

But every day at the rental house, she’s reminded of the things she desperately wants back – stacks of baby clothes she was saving to pass down to her daughter, Barbies from her childhood that she hoped Callie would one day play with and books she wishes she could read to her kids again.

“You kind of just start fresh and everything’s impersonal. You’re wearing clothes that aren’t yours. Your daughter’s wearing clothes that you never picked out for her,” she said.

“You don’t really feel like yourself at all.”

But slowly, the Kindels are adjusting to what will be a temporary normal.

While they have to start from scratch, they hope to be back living in Denare Beach by next spring, even if that means staying in a camper.

“It’s a completely blank slate with a lot of question marks,” Kindel said.