About Us
Hi! We’re the Wilson Family: Matt (Dada), Kari (Mama), and Ollie (Star of the show!). On October 1, 2021, our world changed forever when Ollie was born. From the very beginning, we knew that Ollie was a fighter. His birth was very eventful and he needed extra care from a specialized NICU team at one of the local children’s hospitals. After weeks of tests, it was confirmed that our Ollie boy has an extra 21st chromosome and was diagnosed with his superpower, Down Syndrome. We spent many days and nights in the NICU until his 4 month birthday when he had open heart surgery to repair his VSD (ventricular septal defect). After 10 days of recovery, Ollie was able to come home for the first time ever!
Ollie was fed via a feeding tube (NG tube) from the beginning of his life. Due to needing extra breathing support, Ollie never really learned to drink from a bottle. It was suggested to us that Ollie get a g-tube to support his learning to eat orally. Due to some complications, Ollie aspirated on feeds after he returned home from his open heart surgery, thus sending him back to the hospital to receive a g/j tube. During our training with how to work the feeding pump Ollie was going to be using, we were offered two different pump solutions: an IV pole for our home to clamp the pump to or a clamp arm that we needed to find something stable enough to put on everywhere we wanted to take Ollie. Both solutions were not ideal, leaving our home feeling like a medical facility. We also needed something that would keep Ollie’s continuous feeds cold so we didn’t have to get up every 4 hours to fill his feeding bag. We were exhausted parents and sleep was SO important to us.
Matt, who is extremely creative and a very talented woodworker, thought there had to be a better solution, and there was! After many hours of searching for other feeding pump solutions, he didn’t find anything he was in love with, so he decided to create his own.
Our requirements were that it needed to be understated, easy to use at home and on the go, as well as easy to clean. We wanted our home to feel like a home, not a hospital with IV poles and ugly clamps. We are also a very active family, so we needed a solution that could work both at home, as well as when we were traveling. And finally, spills happen, so we needed a solution that was easy to clean (i.e., dishwasher friendly). The first version was made out of plywood and larger, but as we continued to think about how this could work for us and other families, we were able to make significant modifications to create the Ollie Caddy as it exists today.
One of our Primary NICU nurses saw our Ollie Caddy design and thought that her nephew could benefit from it as he also has a feeding tube. We made one for him and they loved the convenience of the solution. Soon after we began getting requests for more.
Our hope is that the Ollie Caddy will bring comfort and convenience to families that need a solution. We want their home to feel like a home, not a medical facility, and we hope that the Ollie Caddy will provide an understated, but functional option. We want tubie families to experience freedom and flexibility with this solution and allow them to do so with a functional option.