CNN
—
President Joe Biden and first woman Jill Biden met with sufferers at Youngsters’s Nationwide Hospital in Washington on Friday, carrying on a longstanding custom throughout the vacation season.
The primary couple, sporting material masks, met with pediatric sufferers, their households and hospital workers, greeting management and emergency division employees. Dr. Biden learn Ezra Jack Keats’ “The Snowy Day” earlier than the Bidens visited with kids and their households within the cardiac intensive care unit.
“Thanks for coming and listening to me learn and have the president maintain the e-book,” she mentioned after studying, as Biden deadpanned, “It’s my job.”
And the president chimed in with a message for fogeys within the room earlier than departing, saying, “To all you mother and father, be sturdy. We spent a whole lot of time in kids’s hospitals with sufferers too, It’s going to be OK.”
The Bidens’ journey inside Washington comes as a lot of the nation – together with the nation’s capital – faces excessive chilly climate, akin to frigid temperatures, excessive winds and heavy snow.
In response to the White Home, President Biden’s go to final 12 months marked the primary time a sitting president made a vacation go to to Youngsters’s Nationwide.
The go to forward of Christmas Eve comes a day after the president delivered his Christmas address, the place he sought to strike a unifying message.
Biden emphasised in his speech that “we’re certainly making progress” and “issues are getting higher.”
“Covid not controls our lives. Our youngsters are again at school. Persons are again to work. In truth, extra persons are working than ever earlier than,” he mentioned. “People are constructing once more, innovating, dreaming once more.”
Nonetheless, he acknowledged that, for some, “Christmas generally is a time of nice ache and horrible loneliness,” drawing on his personal expertise with loss over the vacations – the deaths of his first spouse and daughter 50 years in the past this week.
“I understand how onerous this time of 12 months will be … nobody can ever know what another person goes by means of, what’s actually happening of their life, what they’re fighting, what to try to overcome. That’s why typically the smallest act of kindness can imply a lot,” Biden remarked.
“So, this Christmas, let’s unfold slightly kindness.”
CORRECTION: This story and headline have been up to date to right the title of the hospital to Youngsters’s Nationwide Hospital.
