Tonight's picture was taken around July 23, 2008, the day Mattie was diagnosed with cancer. When you look at this photo, it may seem very confusing to you. After all, we are outside in short sleeves and there are plants in the flower boxes. However, there are also Christmas lights on display. So what is up with that? Well Mattie requested that we take out all the Christmas displays and put them up. I think on some level he knew that something scary and anxiety provoking was happening and he wanted the lights. I am not really sure why. I was too out of it myself to dig deeper and find out. But the distraction and keeping busy seemed like a good plan at the time. Putting up these Christmas displays was something he and Peter used to do together the day after Thanksgiving in our complex commons area. But since it was July we kept the displays to our deck. The fact that Mattie, at age six, jumped in my lap for this photo was a tell tale sign that he was scared. This was his scared position!
Quote of the day: If you know someone who has lost a child, and you're afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died--you're not reminding them. They didn't forget they died. What you're reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived, and that is a great gift. ~ Elizabeth Edwards
In honor of Mattie's memory, Peter and I have been working around the clock to design and launch the new Mattie Miracle website today. I have wanted the Foundation's website to have a whole new look for a while, but just did not know how to do this. Certainly we could pay a web developer to do this, but that is costly and then I would be right back in the same boat I was in with our old site. With a website that I couldn't access and maintain.
Fortunately with new technology, the average person can design their own website! I say this, but it takes a lot of time and patience! A lot of patience to get the look and feel that you want. You have to play around with formatting, words, and photos. That is just cosmetic part. Then of course you have to worry about the content! My biggest complaint about our old website was it was stagnant and no one could find information about the programmatic work we were doing much less about our achievements. With the new site, everything is housed in one place and the goal is to showcase our work as well as archive our newsletters and materials. We also tried to integrate out taglines ("it's not just about the medicine," and "spreading hope through psychosocial support") throughout and make it clear that our mission is about psychosocial support. Though it is a content rich site, we also felt it was important to integrate photos of Mattie into the site, photos of his treatment team and current Foundation photos! So you will see all sorts of photos on the website because they document how Mattie Miracle became who it is today. At the core it is always about Mattie, he keeps us grounded.
No comments:
Post a Comment