'Where's Waldo?' Game Brings Smiles to Young Patients
Construction workers building hospital expansion move dummy daily.
Sept. 7, 2011 — -- At Seattle Children's Hospital, it's become a daily ritual for the young patients whose rooms face west toward a construction project.
The ritual is finding Waldo, a dummy dressed to look like the storybook character who dons red-and-white stripes.
"I will admit, I get up in the morning and try to find him myself before the kids," Shannon Huber, whose son Jackson is a patient, told ABC News affiliate KOMO-TV.
Workers for Sellen Construction, which is building an 80-bed hospital expansion called Building Hope, created the Waldo six months ago. They move it around the site every day so that children can have fun searching for it from their room windows.
"He's here to bring hope for the kids," said Jerry Kelley, Sellen's project foreman. "It's exciting to get up and see them in the windows every day."
"You have to find him," said one child. "It's like a little game."
On one particular day, a little girl named Makayla concentrated and scanned every inch of the construction site below her window to find Waldo.
"I see it! Over there!" she said.
"They're like, 'Oh, is he behind the ladder?' 'Is it over in the dump?'" said Summer Kunkel, a nurse at Seattle Children's. "Just talking about all the parts of the construction."
Kelley said it was touching.
"Big construction workers out here," he said. "Everyone feels for the help they're giving these kids."
