Violetta Frega may hold a record for earliest church attendance following birth.
While many lament the need to maintain physical distancing and to worship online during the COVID-19 pandemic, computer technology allowed Violetta and her mom, Krista Donough, to join the April 26 Sunday service at Church of the Redeemer in Morristown less than 3½ hours after Violetta entered the world at Morristown Medical Center. Not only that, her mother, the church’s soprano soloist, sang that day’s anthem, recorded earlier.
“It was the miracle of modern technology,” said the Rev. Cynthia Black, Redeemer’s rector. I’ve never had a mother and a baby back in church in 3 hours in all of my 35 years of ordained ministry.”
Donough was 39 weeks pregnant when she went into labor at around 1:30 a.m. on April 26 and gave birth to Violetta Hazel Frega at 7:04 a.m.
“I had just moved from labor and delivery to the mother-baby unit,” she said. “I called my parents, who are members of Church of the Redeemer, and they said, ‘Oh, are you going to dial into church?’ I said, ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’”
This was about 10 a.m., with church set to start at 10:30.
Donough thought: ‘There’s a lot of people in the congregation who would be really glad to get some good news and see a little newborn baby.”
So, while dad Joseph Frega napped, mother and baby showed up from their hospital room for worship on Zoom. Congregants greeted them with delight:
“Wonderful!”
“A beautiful baby! God bless her!”
“Best news I ever heard!”
Said Donough, “I think they were pretty surprised, and everybody had questions and congratulations, and I think everybody was really happy to see her.”
“Under any other circumstances,” she noted, “I sure would not have been in church that day.”
Her voice, however, would have. In recent weeks, she and music director Chris Henke have shuffled videos and sheet music back and forth to provide Black with recordings of her singing to his piano accompaniment for Sunday worship.
The congregation’s newest member, Violetta, arrived weighing 6 pounds, 14 ounces. Her parents named her after Donough’s maternal grandmother, Hazel. “She was a prolific watercolor artist, and her favorite color was purple,” she said. “Her favorite flower was the violet.”
They named their older daughter, Katerina, 2 ½, after Frega’s grandmother.
Technology helped introduce Violetta, not only to the Redeemer congregation, but to her big sister.
“They have met on Facebook but not yet in person,” Donough said on May 8. At that time, Katerina was staying with her paternal grandparents.
“We wanted her to stay there for 14 days just to make sure we didn’t bring the virus home from the hospital.”
The family planned their in-person reunion for May 10: Mother’s Day.
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