Mattie Miracle Walk 2023 was a $131,249 success!

Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation Promotional Video

Thank you for keeping Mattie's memory alive!

Dear Mattie Blog Readers,

It means a great deal to us that you take the time to write to us and to share your thoughts, feelings, and reflections on Mattie's battle and death. Your messages are very meaningful to us and help support us through very challenging times. To you we are forever grateful. As my readers know, I promised to write the blog for a year after Mattie's death, which would mean that I could technically stop writing on September 9, 2010. However, at the moment, I feel like our journey with grief still needs to be processed and fortunately I have a willing support network still committed to reading. Therefore, the blog continues on. If I should find the need to stop writing, I assure you I will give you advanced notice. In the mean time, thank you for reading, thank you for having the courage to share this journey with us, and most importantly thank you for keeping Mattie's memory alive.


As Mattie would say, Ooga Booga (meaning, I LOVE YOU)! Vicki and Peter



The Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation celebrates its 7th anniversary!

The Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation was created in the honor of Mattie.

We are a 501(c)(3) Public Charity. We are dedicated to increasing childhood cancer awareness, education, advocacy, research and psychosocial support services to children, their families and medical personnel. Children and their families will be supported throughout the cancer treatment journey, to ensure access to quality psychosocial and mental health care, and to enable children to cope with cancer so they can lead happy and productive lives. Please visit the website at: www.mattiemiracle.com and take some time to explore the site.

We have only gotten this far because of people like yourself, who have supported us through thick and thin. So thank you for your continued support and caring, and remember:

.... Let's Make the Miracle Happen and Stomp Out Childhood Cancer!

A Remembrance Video of Mattie

July 13, 2018

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Thursday, July 12, 2018

This shot was taken in July 2007 during a bath moment when Mattie was getting silly.

Mattie's baths would sometimes have Vicki in the bathroom with him for an hour or more. The actual "get clean" part of the exercise lasted only minutes, and well, the rest was all about the play.

Vicki would eventually drain the tub in an effort to get Mattie out of the tub, but he would just sit there, no water, and continue playing. He was quite the pip. I miss him dearly.

Well, Vicki arrived home tonight after an almost three week long trip to her parent's home in Los Angeles. Her parents sold their house and have moved into a rental, and as any who has moved knows: "moving sucks". Simply stated.

Vicki worked like a mad woman for three weeks helping her parents to cull through household and personal items they no longer needed and were holding onto unnecessarily. Let's face it: we are ALL guilty of doing this. I liken the accumulation of personal things in part to a bath tub faucet that has a tiny drip from it. Each dip seems inconsequential, but if you put the stopper in the tub and walk away, when you come back, you will have a bathtub full of water. It happens to all of us.

With moving, besides the huge emotional component of relocation, you also have the pure physical challenge of sorting, packing, moving and then unpacking. I think unpacking is worse that packing! So, if you are smart, and Vicki is more than smart, you thin out things as you prepare to move, so you are not moving things unnecessarily and are left with the burden of what to do with them when you get to your new home. But you also pack in such a way as to facilitate unpacking at the new home. Vicki's parents moved into a rental home three doors around the corner, which meant Vicki could throw a ton of things into the car, drive it around the corner and then unpack them, room or area-by-area in the new home. While convenient, it also meant Vicki made endless trip after trip between the two homes, carrying things down to the car, then carrying them into the new home and placing them.

The net result is that the movers just had to move the big stuff (i.e. beds, furniture, TVs, etc.) as everything else had already been moved by Vicki. In fact, on the night before she left LA, she had unpacked the last moving bin. This meant that Vicki was able to leave her parents in a completely "moved in" state. Quite a huge help to her parents, which I know they appreciated.

I leave you with a series of shots of Mattie. Thanks for indulging me with all these pictures, but I just like seeing his face, something that is hard to do since he is no longer with us.























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