Hearts for Lucy

We've been messy craft machines around our house lately, and yesterday we made some pretty special pieces - Hearts for Lucy:

The Cupcake with her creations

Lucy is the youngest of 4 children in the Marlett family. Lucy is dying. Soon. Her parents have realized this and made the difficult move to comfort care, and part of the comfort they want to provide to their daughter (and their 3 other young children) is to fill Lucy's hospital room with hearts and cards and love.

I found out about their request from a Facebook link to a blog link to a different blog link - I hadn't read the family's blog or heard of them before I saw it, and honestly I haven't read much beyond the most recent posts even now,  but I knew immediately we would be on board to send some love. I can't imagine these circumstances, and I hope I never have to, but I can do crafts and I too have a love of mail. I can only imagine that a Santa-sack full of sparkly envelopes just might perk up the family's feelings, if only for a brief time.

We had just picked up some foam hearts and princess stickers thinking they might be useful around Valentine's Day, so I rationed a few out to TC and just let her go to town. I did the letters in Lucy's name and centered one of the hearts, otherwise it's all 3 year old chaos and excess. I think that works. It's sparkly and happy, and that's what we'd like to send to Lucy and her family. A few moments of sparkles and happiness.

We're sending them per the instructions on the family blog:

Our hope and prayer for Lucy in these final days, weeks…is that we'll surround her with love, wrap her in it, bathe her in it, saturate her with it! 
So...I have an idea.  Not unlike any other admission in which our girl celebrated so many holidays in the hospital, we need to decorate her room.  It's time to take down the Christmas decorations, and bring on the LOVE!  For the love of Lucy send hearts, send cards, send love notes to Lucy, affirmations of love…help us surround her with love.

The hospital address is:

Nemours A. I. DuPont Hospital for Children

℅ Lucy Marlett Room 3708

1600 Rockland Road
Wilmington, DE 19803  

You can read more about Lucy and her family, or their request at AllTheMarletts

Donate a chunk of hair to locks of love - Bucketlist #51

I've been in a hair funk for quite some time. Post TC I pretty much wore a standard-issue mom ponytail for two years, all about function with zero style or styling requirements. I had bangs for a while, which gave me the illusion that I had some sort of actual hair style, but eventually I realized I wasn't really keeping up with those either (my hair grows fast and I wasn't making it out for solo haircuts very often, even if they were fast and cheap, and NO WAY was I doing it myself. I have no skills for haircutting). As TC has grown and I've been able to steal a few moments away I'd started to sort of style my hair for some special occasions - I'd flat iron out the weird ripples that developed during my pregnancy, curl the ends under, it would look okay:

Christmas 2012

But I soon realized that even when my hair started out looking presentable, it would mat and knot under it's own friction and by the end of the day I'd have a huge rat's nest at the base of my neck. It was embarassing, I'm sure it looked awful, and it sucked to try and comb (rip) out. I don't know how people with long hair do it, if they just have thinner hair than I do, or brush it every hour, or use some magic product, but I couldn't take it. I was sick of the ponytail, and couldn't hack keeping it down, so I did some measurements and determined it was time to tackle bucketlist #51 - donate to locks of love.

Donations need to be a minimum of 10", so I divided my hair into 4 ponytails and put binders around 11" up, meaning the first cut was about 12" off.

My  hair is so thick, I think I get credit for 2 or 3 donations for this :) It was like an actual pony's tail when I wrapped it all up.

I didn't take any photos at the salon, I purposefully left my camera at home because the pressures of this mega cut were enough without feeling like I had to be in photos right away. The strange ladies next to me appeared to take several photos though, and couldn't stop asking me about what was going on (shouldn't going to the salon be relaxing? Who does that to other people?!?!) and basically narrating the whole experience (you're  not helping!)

I don't have any great "after" photos yet, but I definitely feel a foot lighter. The new cut makes more sense with the new texture of my hair (I got wavy during pregnancy, so it was really weird to have 4" of waves then straight for 16". Awkward), it's low fuss and dries quickly, or I can curl/iron it up for a different look. It looks WAY lighter in color with all the bulk gone too, neither good nor bad, but interesting.

I doubt I'll ever have hair this long again, so I'm glad I could make it count - the hair will help sick little girls feel better about their appearance with custom fit hairpieces, definitely a worthy cause.