Shoeboxes for St. Jude

The final result of our Shoeboxes for St. Jude drive - 130 shoeboxes!! Two co-workers and I took all of these boxes to St. Jude in Peoria....my friend's Tahoe was PACKED! We had to be careful when we opened the back so that no boxes would spill out!



I learned a lot about St. Jude as we made about 4 trips from the car to their offices. Did you know that the next closest St. Jude facility (from Peoria) is Memphis (their headquarters)?!? I thought St. Jude was all over the place, but really they only have a few satellite offices. How lucky are we to live near one?? And the reason that St. Jude has a satellite office in Peoria is thanks to former Mayor Jim Maloof. He was a personal friend of the founder of St. Jude and he convinced his friend that Peoria would be an excellent spot for a satellite office, and he was right! We now have some of the top oncology doctors working close by!

So much to blog about...

I have a lot to blog about, so I broke it into two different entries - the Vegas pictures are in the next entry below!

It's been a super busy weekend. On Friday night, with some help from good friends, I made 72 of my 'special' cupcakes for my friend Elizabeth's baby shower on Saturday. We didn't NEED 72 cupcakes, but I wanted to provide a variety of flavors (chocolate, french vanilla, and strawberry), so 3 cake mixes made that many!

Sunday evening, my friends and I filled and decorated 17 shoeboxes for St. Jude! The contents of the boxes were donated by a good friend, and all we had to do was decorate, decorate, decorate!

Jamie, Elizabeth, and me cutting, gluing, etc. We had help from two other friends, but they left before I thought to take a picture!

Most of the completed boxes, stacked on my couch.

The shoebox drive is this Wednesday! We're hoping to have around 100 shoeboxes to take to St. Jude!!

On a different note, two weeks ago I interviewed for a Team Manager position, and I'm happy to report that I was selected! Yippee!! I'll start my new job in early April.

I'm off to decorate ONE LAST SHOEBOX!

Shoeboxes for St. Jude

I'm part of a group at work that is sponsoring a drive to collect "Shoeboxes for St. Jude". This is near and dear to my heart because one of my littlest friends was diagnosed with neuroblastoma just a couple weeks ago, and she is now a St. Jude patient. You can read all about my friend at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/princesstess. Tess will turn 4 years old next week, so you can imagine the difficult and confusing journey her and her parents are going through right now. Take some time to read their website - it is so inspiring.

The Shoeboxes for St. Jude drive is an effort to collect shoeboxes full of games, toys, and treats to entertain young cancer patients as they go through chemotherapy. There are four categories of boxes - little girl, little boy, tween/teen girl, tween/teen boy. Tess is very fortunate to have strong support around her, however some of her new St. Jude friends don't have that kind of support. I'm planning to make a couple shoeboxes for this drive, and if you would like make one too, let me know and I can take it to the 'drive' for you. I'm looking forward to decorating and filling these boxes with all sorts of goodies that will bring a smile to a young cancer patients face! The shoeboxes will be collected the second week of March, so I'll be sure to post pictures of my final products! Once all the boxes are collected, the group will take them to St. Jude in Peoria where they will be distrubted to the patients.

If you are truly interested in making a shoebox, let me know and I can send you a document that has suggestions on what types of things to put into the box for each category. The key is to remember that these items should be something that keep them relatively still since they are hooked up to an IV while going through chemo. Examples of goodies include coloring books, crayons, stickers, tatoos, matchbox cars, etc.