9/11 Babies Asking About Missing Dads

Julie McMahon holds her younger son, Patrick, 4, as her older boy, Matthew, 6, looks on in their back yard in Westport, Conn., Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006. She delivered baby Patrick while her husband, Bobby, a firefighter and high school baseball star, looked on from a photograph on the bedside table. (AP Photo/Bob Child) (Bob Child - AP)

NEW YORK -- Four-year-old Gabriel Jacobs inherited his dad's sandy hair, long nose and blue eyes. The day they buried what was left of his father _ a piece of rib, part of a thigh bone, a bit of one arm _ the boy released a balloon into the air, then turned that familiar face skyward to make sure his daddy caught it.

This is how a son reaches out to the father he never met. Ariel Jacobs died in the World Trade Center attack six days before his only child was born.

"When he sends a balloon up to the sky and he finally sees the tiny dot of the balloon go through the clouds, he says, 'OK, the balloon found the doorway to heaven, I think he has it now," says Gabi's mother, Jenna Jacobs-Dick.

There are dozens of children like Gabi Jacobs, born to Sept. 11 widows in the months after the attacks. Five years later, as they approach kindergarten, they are just beginning to grasp the stories of their fathers and of the day that changed their lives forever.

The first baby arrived just hours after the disaster, and the last nine months later. Some mothers only discovered they were pregnant after the dads were gone _ including Rudolph Giuliani's longtime aide, who was married to fire Capt. Terence Hatton. The firefighter's daughter was born the next spring, and her mother named her Terri.

Their fathers were rescue workers, cops, restaurant waiters and stockbrokers. Their mothers, pregnant and alone when the dust of the towers settled, worried about the stress on their unborn children from the agony and shock. Some miscarried. One went into labor during her husband's memorial service.

Many moms broke down in the delivery room, where they tried to fill that empty space with photos, a police badge, a piece of clothing. Friends, sisters and in-laws with cameras and brave faces stood in for all those lost dads.

Each delivery was, all at once, wonderful and awful.

Julie McMahon remembers her son's birth in early 2002 as a day of jangled nerves. "It wasn't supposed to be this way," she thought.

She delivered baby Patrick while her husband, Bobby, a firefighter with natural athleticism and a love of photography, looked on from a picture on the bedside table. The photo captured a moment of pure happiness _ Bobby, wearing a cap and a giant grin, leans over their first son Matthew, clutching a massive tuft of cotton candy.

Patrick arrived with Bobby's curly hair and lanky body, and has sprouted into a miniature version of his daredevil dad. The child took his mother's breath away recently when he bounded by, swinging his arms and moving his head just so _ it was Bobby's carefree strut.

When James Patrick's son was born, everyone agreed it was like looking at his father _ the same fair skin, blue eyes and brown hair, that certain way he moved his mouth. The Cantor Fitzgerald bond broker, ecstatic about starting a family, died seven weeks before Jack entered the world.