Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Tonight's picture was taken in May of 2002. Mattie was one month old. When I look at this photo Mattie looks so peaceful, one would think that perhaps Mattie was a baby that was always this calm, sleepy, and sedate. But I assure you this was a very rare moment in time. Mattie was born on and for the most part rarely napped even as an infant. It was almost as if he was hard wired to appreciate every aspect of life because his body knew he wasn't going to be here long enough to enjoy it from a longevity standpoint. 


Quote of the day: The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains. ~ Josephine Baker

The series of photos I am featuring tonight are challenge wall cups from the Foundation's Walk. We launched a whole new concept this year at the Walk. We asked people within our support community to create walk teams. Which meant that the team had to have a captain and team members who were willing to fundraise and build awareness for the psychosocial issues associated with childhood cancer as well as promote the mission of Mattie Miracle. Then on the day of the Walk, teams and individuals attended to participate in our Challenge Walk. Each team was assigned a cup color. For each lap walked, a colorful cup was earned. The cup was placed within our challenge wall, and the goal was to see which team completed the most number of laps (or essence earned the largest number of cups by the end of our event).  As this poster indicates, each team was assigned a particular cup color. 

Some walk teams dressed in certain colors, or used signs and headbands to identify themselves! As walkers moved around the track, they eventually came to our cup distribution table......








Here is a close up of our rainbow of cups at our cup distribution table. Literally walkers completed a lap and then walked passed this table, picked up their designated colored cup, and carried it over to the challenge wall.

We had some wonderful local high school students helping us distribute cups to our walkers. These young ladies are no strangers to Mattie Miracle, since they have volunteered with us in the past! The young girl on the left is Haley Leis, and she is our top teen fundraiser this year, who generated $1,478 for the Foundation! 

This photo makes me laugh! Apparently there is more than one thing you can do with this colorful cup! Maybe it is a telephone?! You never know!! He clearly wanted to check before placing the cup in the challenge wall! Too adorable. 

Once a walker picked up a colorful cup, the next step was to walk it over to our challenge wall! Which was literally the chain link fence. Volunteers would accept the cup and then help place it in the chain link. As you can see the fence started slowly accumulating cups throughout the event. While cups were accumulating, we had another team of dedicated students tallying cup colors to tell us which teams were walking the most laps throughout the event! 

Peter is pictured here with Emily. Emily is a nursing student at Georgetown University and she was a dedicate challenge wall tallier at the Walk! Which is no easy task, because it is very easy to lose track of what color cup you are counting and to screw up the process. But Emily kept us organized, running efficiently, and with accurate tallies!  

You can get a feeling for what the challenge wall
looked like completed! Also, along the wall we literally spelled out in big block letters "CHALLENGE WALL" in orange!

Here is a photo of some of the members of the team who won the challenge wall competition.....The Blessed Sacrament Bullfrogs! The Bullfrogs walked the most laps, which meant they placed the largest number of cups in the Challenge Wall! Way to go Bullfrogs.