Saturday, May 5, 2018

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Tonight's picture was taken in April of 2006. Mattie was four years old. That day I took him to the Reston Zoo. At the time, that was a small zoo, that was really geared to the preschooler. Lots of hands on activities, but in a more intimate setting than our larger National Zoo. Didn't Mattie make a cute sheep?


Quote of the day: You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I absolutely love tonight's quote, because I am hoping through all the chaos we are living through now, that the Walk on May 20th, is a shining star. Practically every room in our home has something Walk related in it. It is challenging to plan the Walk, but also a logistical nightmare, as Walk materials come out of storage and fill up our home. You maybe asking yourself what kind of stuff?

Try over 5,000 colorful cups to start with, as we use cups to denote each lap an individual completes. Then we have hundreds of Mattie Miracle professionally printed posters. Posters that highlight our work, childhood cancer facts, and children and families impacted by cancer. This year, we also bought 6 pop up tents because I am tired of not having access to the tents we need for our activities and vendors. So all of this is going on in our living and dining rooms.

Whereas, I am happy to report that Mattie's room was cleared out today as we delivered ten wrapped raffle baskets, their ticket holders, and placards to our raffle chair. My second floor headache has now become Carolyn's. It isn't only our home impacted by the Walk, it is Carolyn's and my friends, Christine and Debbie. Christine is our registration chair, and soon her home will be filled with over 400 t-shirts and Walk programs. Debbie is our children's craft coordinator and her home is being transformed by bug and flower crafts at the moment. I know why we take on this Walk challenge, but you have to really admire our friends who volunteer to be a part of this chaos. 

A visual of our first floor. Boxes all over the place of colorful cups. Each cup color represents a different Walk team. Peter helped me tremendously today reassemble all of these boxes and then placed the appropriate colored cup in each box. Since storing all these boxes would be unwieldy in storage, we break down the boxes and store them and the cups in bins. So the process to assembling and disassembling is tedious. 

Meanwhile under our staircase are Foundation posters. Of which we have to go through them and figure out which ones will go on display this year. 

Also keep in mind that I met with the printer on Friday and have 40 new posters to display this year. Just trying to paint a picture of the level of effort it takes to put the Walk together.