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 7, 2014

Monday, July 7, 2014

Monday, July 7, 2014

Tonight's picture was taken in July of 2002. If I had to title this photo, I would call it, "can you hear what I hear?" That day I was snapping photos of Mattie. I was trying to get his attention and honestly I had been trying to take photos of him for days because I wanted just the right photo to send out to friends and family! Needless to say this wasn't the one I selected! Mattie was three months old here and FULLY on!!!


Quote of the day: Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow. ~ Helen Keller

I made up my mind this morning that I was somehow going to plow through a stack of research articles, do more research article searching and then begin writing one of the book chapters that I committed to writing for the Foundation this summer. This has been an absolutely daunting task for me. Mainly because I am exhausted from a very full year with the Foundation. The notion of sitting still, concentrating by the computer, and delving into more research, and focusing on childhood cancer this summer really wasn't how I planned on spending my July. In fact, it makes me upset when I think about it. When I committed to the two chapters, I really did not give much thought to their deadlines. The hardest part to any project is starting and I find the most difficult part to writing anything is the introduction. I have an outline that I am working from, but even the problem with the outline is the questions I want to answer! In many cases I do not have concrete answers. Or at least answers that have solid research to back them up! That would be okay for my blog writings, but not great for a book chapter which will have an audience of medical doctors. Any case, as Heller's quote illustrated for us in a figurative sense.... I put my face to the sunshine today. I literally sat in Mattie's room, at my desk by the window all day. I had Mattie's fountains going on our deck, the windows open and I literally worked all day long. In one day's time, I generated one page. I realize, pathetic, but to me it was the hardest page to generate. I may keep going back at it, but it is a start, from which I will be building. I also have two of our wonderful psycho-oncologists who work with Foundation collaborating on this chapter with me. So it is a team effort, but as lead author of this chapter, I have the majority of the work and responsibility and though this is a chapter based on research, Mattie's case and history will be integrated within it to give the content meaning and depth. That to me makes the chapter much more complex and harder to write, because Mattie's story needs to be finely weaved in a meaningful manner. 

So I am signing off for today, because at this point, the computer and I are almost one!

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