Holiday Shopping Event to Benefit Drew

Please join us for our 6th Annual Home Show and get a jump start on your holiday shopping.
This year, everyone will donate a portion of their sales to help Drew and the Ames family.
Funds raised will help the Ames family with Drew's medical expenses.

Saturday, November 12, 2011 10A—3P
Mindy Bergeron’s
1N275 Blue Jay Court, Carol Stream
630-221-8978

Shop from
Avon, Carm’s Creations
(Custom Kids Clothing)
Covered in Chocolate
Guy and Eva Jewelry
PartyLite
Tastefully Simple
and Thirty One Gifts!
We will also have baked goods for sale and a raffle!!!

Radiation Complete

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Radiation done. Next up - Round 5 of Chemo.

Me & my superman

Our Fundraiser was a HUGE Success!

We held our Spaghetti Dinner fundraiser with LIVE auction on Friday night, October 14th.
It was a huge success thanks to so many people!

We wish to thank the Wheaton Bowl and Pal Joey's who did the catering.
Thanks to our auctioneer Jennifer with Auction by Jennifer and for the wonderful music by the band.

It was a great evening of fun and food and entertainment.
Drew was able to make a brief appearance and have some dinner with his family.
We had 85 awesome auction items and over 100 raffle items.
We sold Team Drew t-shirts and buttons and had a split the pot.

Our family, friends, community, local businesses and church members rallied around us and embraced us in this effort.

We want to thank the many volunteers and all that donated their time and services for this wonderful cause.

Our grand total is
$31,849
All for the love of a special little boy.

Dinner Tickets SOLD-OUT!

WOW!
The response from the community has been overwhelming!!

We have received so much support from so many people that we have
SOLD OUT
of take-out and dine-in tickets for our spaghetti dinner
being held on October 14th.

But don't worry there are other ways for you to help.

Come and buy a Team Drew T-shirt
(Adult $15, Child $10)

Also come to our LIVE AUCTION which is open to the public starting at 8pm on October 14th.

Yard Sale Fundraiser Raises $2,014.36!

YARD SALE FUNDRAISER RAISES $2014.36!

This is Drew's aunt and uncle, Denise and Brandon, from down here in good 'ol San Antonio. Last weekend was a pretty busy weekend for us. Many friends and neighbors came together to help us put together our fundraiser for Drew that was held on Saturday. We wanted to help Drew in any way we could so we decided on putting on this yard sale. About five weeks ago we set a date and then began asking around for donations of things to sell. It was amazing how many people wanted to help in any way they could. The donations kept piling in and our garage could barely hold them all. We knew our small yard wouldn't be a good location to hold this fundraiser so we began by asking our community HOA if we could have this sale under our community park pavillion. Even though holding fundraisers there was against the rules, they made this one exception since they were touched by Drew's story and they wanted to be able to help out. We are so grateful for them letting us use this area because I don't think we would have gotten as great of a turn out if it were anywhere else. We then realized that we had a huge job of transporting all these items and wondered how we were going to do it. We began by calling around to the moving truck companies and Penske was kind enough to donate one of their trucks to our cause. We couldn't have done it without their help.

We posted signs up all around the neigborhood, in our local online news, craigslist, the elementary school, and anywhere else that was willing to get the word out. We were worried because the forcast said there was a chance for rain. We've had the worst drought in San Antonio history this summer, yet the day we plan to put this yard sale together it was supposed to rain. Like my mom said, San Antonio was blessed with rain because of everyone's willingness to serve. Sure enough, the morning of, it began to rain. We didn't know how we were going to pull this off and we had so much stuff to set up. People were gathering in at 7am, in the rain, waiting for us to be ready. The sale wasn't supposed to start until 8am. Luckily so many friends were there to help us set up and brought tents, tables, and tarps. We were able to keep everything covered. It was a wet day, but the rain let up just enough for us to be able to pull this off. It was amazing how many people came. Tons of people just kept coming through. We were so busy, we didn't have a moment to sit or to eat. People came to donate more items to sell or to just donate money. One of the neighborhood girls showed up to volunteer her time. She held one of the signs that we made and flagged people down for hours. Cars were turning around to come check it out because of her hard work. Several friends of ours contributed by baking yummy treats to sell that were nearly gone before the day was over.

As things began to slow down, we took a look around and nearly everything had sold. What a blessing. We ended up exceeding our goal in the amount of money we raised. We were truly touched by the kindness and thoughtfulness of so many. We couldn't have pulled this off without the help of our wonderful community and friends to whom we are incredibly grateful. Everyone united together for the love of one little boy and miracles happened.

THANK YOU!

Fever

Monday, October 10, 2011

Well we are back at the hospital with a fever and neutropenia. We made it through the weekend and thought again that just maybe we could get through this round without a fever, but Sunday night it hit.

Since we are still in the middle of radiation everyday, which is so close to home, we made the attempt to try and go to our local hospital to be admitted to ease the whole transport issue. Turns out they didn't feel prepared to handle the situation and sent us down to Children's anyway. No big deal right? Well since we had gone to their ER, they wouldn't just let us leave and get in our car and drive down to Children's (like we do every other time), but instead made us be transported by ambulance. So after the SEVEN hour process, we finally made it down at 4am.

For being the middle of the night and having a fever of 103 (down from 105), Drew did great on the ambulance. The transport team was all guys which I think he enjoyed. He even rode in the back with them and let me ride up front with no problem. I think the fact that they had Spongebob on their iphone was a big influence. They even pulled out little headphones for him when he said he couldn't hear it en route because the ambulance was too loud.

He just got a blood and platelet transfusion and has been sleeping most of the day, making up for our sleepless night. I on the other hand have gotten four 2 minute naps.

Brooke came with last week when we had to come get a platelet transfusion. For the most part they do really good together. Brooke packed her own bag of toys and snacks to take along. She made sure to bring her little lego girls because she knew Drew would want to play legos.

Just a pic of Dallin & Kelsey. He's always so good to her and such a good little helper.

After I had Drew and went back to work and Debbie was still our babysitter, she took Blake and Drew to a Music Together class once a week when they were just 5 and 8 months old. They had the most wonderful teacher, Ms. Christy. Last week Drew was doing so well that Ms. Christy offered to come over to do a music class for the kids. We have a whole preschool class just between my kids and Debbie's alone. It was so much fun and Drew really got into it which was so good for him. He has regained so much strength being home for almost 2 weeks. Lets hope this stay is a short one.

Round 4

Sunday, October 2, 2011

I have been a bit behind with getting this post up b/c my computer totally crashed last weekend and we haven't been able to recover it. At first I felt lost without it, but then it was kind of refreshing to be away from it too, so I took a little break, but I am back up and running now!

We actually finished our 4th inpatient round of chemo last week and have been home since Thursday night. We are still in the middle of radiation, but are more than half way done. Last week the machine at radiation went down and we weren't able to be treated on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. We got Drew's lab results late on Monday and were surprised that his counts were good enough to get started with chemo, so when we found out that things were still down at Proton, we quickly made a plan to get chemo started on Tuesday. We only had to be transported from the hospital out to ProCure once during our inpatient stay, which was on Thursday, since things were still down on Wednesday. The interesting part is that had the machine not been back up and working on Thursday, we would have been headed to Oklahoma City for treatment! And we thought the transport from the city back out to the burbs was long! Thankfully they got things working and then they opened on Saturday to treat everyone and make up at least one of the days and the others will be next weekend or added at the end.

Drew is feeling really good and we had what felt like an almost normal day.

Drew was pretending to be a zombie and coming to get me and insisted that I shoot at him and he would fall over. Too many video games you think?! You can see his weapons on the floor next to him and he put zhu zhu pet armor on his shins. When Brooke saw me getting a picture, she couldn't resist getting in on the action!

A little Halloween preview for you. Drew is so into Star Wars right now and Uncle Bruce had told him about this Boba Fett costume that he made for his son (Drew's cousin) Devon. He was pretty excited to try it on today and made sure to shoot everyone with the gun. Should we be concerned about all this "shoot gun" stuff (as Drew calls it)?