CNN
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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 through the vacation season.
The primary couple, sporting material masks, met with pediatric sufferers, their households and hospital workers, greeting management and emergency division staff. 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 folks within the room earlier than departing, saying, “To all you dad and mom, be robust. We spent quite a 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, reminiscent of frigid temperatures, excessive winds and heavy snow.
Based on the White Home, President Biden’s go to final yr 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 tackle, 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. The truth is, extra individuals are working than ever earlier than,” he mentioned. “Individuals 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 yr will be … nobody can ever know what another person goes via, what’s actually happening of their life, what they’re scuffling with, what to attempt to overcome. That’s why generally the smallest act of kindness can imply a lot,” Biden remarked.
“So, this Christmas, let’s unfold just a little kindness.”
CORRECTION: This story and headline have been up to date to appropriate the identify of the hospital to Youngsters’s Nationwide Hospital.