Almost every one of them has a special memento. For one young widow, it is a crushed wedding ring. For another, a brick from the house she and her husband had just built. For still others, it is a cardboard box of clippings that recount the story they do not want to remember, but will be unable to forget. These are precious artifacts to those who lost loved ones on Sept. 11. But for at least 50 women, there are even more cherished reminders of the husbands who died that day. They are wives who were pregnant when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania -- and they have since become proud and loving mothers. Of 52 new babies born to the young widows of 9/11, Dena Smagala, 31, of Holbrook, N.Y., who lost her firefighter husband, Stanley, and gave birth to Alexa Faith on Jan. 9, treasures the handmade Christmas ornaments sent to her by kids from all over the U.S Dena Smagala An Empty Place at the Dinner Table Smagala has Stan's hats and baby Alexa to cherish (Erica Berger/Corbis Outline) Last spring, when Stanley Smagala Jr. saw the dinner table set for three, he asked his wife, Dena, 31, "Who's coming?" She handed him a baby's bib inscribed with the words "I Love Daddy." Now the empty place at the Smagala table in Holbrook, N.Y., is Stanley's. Nearly four months before daughter Alexa Faith was born on Jan. 9, he died when the Twin Towers collapsed. The couple had struggled to conceive a child and weathered a miscarriage in August 2000. Stanley chose the name to celebrate "keeping the faith to have a baby," says Smagala, a teacher. She'll treasure his memory through videotaped tributes his friends are preparing, plans to rename their neighborhood block after him and talks she'll have with Alexa. "I'll tell her all the little things," Smagala says. "How he liked hot chocolate made from milk, not water."

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