Dallas Schmidt, 10, worked silently at the table, carefully painting red, green and yellow stripes on a white rubber duck.

He didn’t get one drop of the bright colors on his white shirt, on which was pinned a big button sporting a picture of his newborn sister, Trinity Grace, 3 months old.

“She was born too early and has a hard time breathing. It was sad to see her in an incubator,” her face covered with a big mask to help her breathe, and all kinds of tubes and monitors attached to her, Dallas said.

Working on the toy duck “really helped, knowing it was going to my sister,” he said. “I let my feelings out on the duck. I’m praying every day that my sister can come home.”

He and another sister, Kailee, 8, attended a workshop on April 28 for families of patients in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children. It was held by Prayers on Wings, a nonprofit whose mission is to encourage families in crisis to keep the lines of communication open, and to help each other bear the trauma.

Their mother, Kennie Schmidt, said her two older children visit after school on Wednesdays and stay all day on the weekends, taking turns seeing the baby for

15-minute intervals. Schmidt said she was 26 weeks’ pregnant when she gave birth to Trinity, who weighed only

1 pound, 5 ounces. In early May, the baby had been removed from the incubator and was being prepared to leave for home.

The workshop was a

welcome diversion for the children, who had been spending most of their time in the waiting room while their parents were with Trinity.

When they first saw their tiny sister, Schmidt said, laughing, “Kailee thought she was fake. She said, ‘What is that — is that real?’ She said, ‘It looks like an alien!’”

She added: “Dallas is very reserved, very reserved, but observant. He was quiet,” but had lots of questions once out of the hospital room.

Attending the paint-a-duck workshop lifted their spirits, “knowing they’re doing something for their sister,” Schmidt said. “For Dallas, I know it made him feel good.” His duck is waiting for Trinity where she will sleep at home. Kailee decorated her duck like a princess, adding sparkly red stickers, but felt bad about it  later. “She said, ‘Mine is ugly. I don’t want to give it to her.’ She tried to fix it, but it just got worse,” Schmidt said.

“We have no problem

with communication. (Sometimes) it’s too much. We’re very open in our family,” which includes husband Tini Schmidt, she said. But she said she has seen other families struggle with not sharing their feelings with each other when a child is ill.

Prayers on Wings founder Devin Nakasone, diagnosed with leukemia as a child, had no one to share his fears and worries with besides the rubber duck he took into the bathroom with him when he allowed himself to cry, he told participants. He started the organization to prevent other ill children from experiencing the loneliness he did.

In an interview, Nakasone said “all families are different,” but everyone who takes part in the workshops “don’t walk out the same way” they came in. They are much more relaxed when they leave, and many send appreciative messages of how “great or awesome” the experience was, he said.

“We’ve noticed it’s very therapeutic. They get to express their love in painting a duck,” he added. Families start interacting with other families as they paint and, most importantly, bonding with their own relatives.

The NICU families are the most challenging because their sick child can’t participate in the workshop, unlike kids with cancer or other diseases, and he never knows what to expect. Nakasone doesn’t ask about the condition of their sick child — “You can see it on their faces.”

One incident in particular stands out, involving a father who was very standoffish and refused at first to paint, though he stayed while his wife and daughter participated. “This guy was tough,” and kept making wisecracks about the inanity of the activity, but as time passed, “we saw him soften,” Nakasone said.

The man started painting a duck a pastel pink, capping it off with thick eyelashes. When he was finished, he held it up and kept telling everyone, “Look! I painted this for my daughter!” and went around encouraging others to join the activity, Nakasone added.