Back it up!

Last week Sully learned how to open the back door and get outside to play with the dogs. He's also been busy mastering going down the stairs, backwards. Apparently, backwards is all the rage now because if there is anything that stands in the way between him and whatever it is he wants, he goes over it, backwards. Wires, blocks, pillows, the dogs - backwards, backwards backwards.

His favorite new thing now is blowing kisses, right before he slams the door in your face. He prefers big boy food over his jar food now, almost completely refusing to eat the stuff except when his mouth hurts. We're working on two new teeth at the moment.

I mean I know everyone keeps telling me how quickly they start to grow, but gawd kid, slow down!

Breaking through the first goal

Last week we officially reached our first goal of raising $1,000.00 for Baby Wyatt. To date, our friends and family have raised $1,070.00. This was made possible by some very generous friends and family who made some very generous donations. Thank you all so much!

Next week is Sully's 1st birthday and we're expecting quite the group. Our little quiet gathering has turned into a 60 person pizza party at the park. Thank god we decided to have it in the park, because I have no idea where we would have put all those people in the house! We plan to set up a little place for Wyatt and are hoping that after Sully's party, we'll be that much closer to our second goal of $2,000.00.

If we would like to make a donation to this very special guy and his family, we have a Paypal.com account set up and donations can be sent to Wyattsheart@yahoo.com. You can also read more about baby Wyatt at a site his Mama has set up for him at www.Caringbridge.com/visit/wyattgreeno

Family & friends, feel free to mail us! Thank you, thank you, thank you all for your kindness.

Address ...

I've removed our address since we've had a lot of friends and friends online forward the information to third parties we don't know. I don't know, it just kind of creeps me out having our info out there now with so many potential strangers looking at the info.

If you don't want to donate through paypal or don't know how, you can always contact me for further information.

Update

We're nearing the $800.00 mark of raised donations, and its only week one!

Hard to believe the overwhelming response we're getting from so many different people wanting to help. We've had people making donations since the day we posted, we've had donations showing up at our house, offers of bake sales, garage sales and piggy banks at desks to collect change for the cause.

We know times are tough financially for so many right now - which makes the donations we have been receiving on behalf on Wyatt all that more amazing. You people have huge hearts.

We can not thank you enough. The Greeno family can not thank you enough. Wyatt can not thank you enough. People who want to help still exist. Good, kind-hearted people still exist. It gives me hope for my son and Wyatt's generation.

Again, if you want to donate we have a paypal account now set up. All donations can be sent to Wyattsheart@yahoo.com

Thank you again
Stephanie

(To read Wyatts story see Sully's letter below a few posts down)

Wyatt's heart ...

Hey all. We now have a Paypal account set up for Baby Wyatt donations. (A lot of you have been asking) So, for those of you who have not used paypal before, here is what you do:

1. Go to www.paypal.com
2. Click on Send Money
3. The email address you are sending it to is Wyattsheart@yahoo.com
4. Click it as personal gift
5. Fill out your info and send

Thank you all who have been messaging and texting me with what you can do to help. I knew we always had amazing friends, I'm just amazed at how many!

Raising money for Baby Wyatt

My love, my son Sullivan - I hope you look back on this one day and realize the importance of helping others before helping ourselves. That you understand wealth and value are not measured by the amount of materialistic things you possess in life's toy box - but by what you're able to give back. That we don't need an authority in church or a book to learn what compassion and kindness is about. We do it because simply put - its the right thing to do.

I hope you look back on this one day and realize no matter how small, we are all capable of tremendous things.(Sully's birthday in April has now been turned into a donation event! In lieu of gifts we sent out a similar letter to our friends & family attending his birthday asking for a small contribution instead. In addition, we are asking everyone we know to please take a moment and read below and consider making a small donation!)

A letter from Sullivan

The Wyatt Greeno Heart Fund
“I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back.” – Maya Angelou

Dear Friends & Family,
My name is Sullivan, but most of you know me as Sully. I may be a little guy but mommy says that sometimes the smallest people are capable of the biggest things! I have a very special request; I would like for you to help my family and I raise money so that my friend Wyatt can get a healthy heart.

My Mommy and Auntie Jillian have been friends for almost 15 years. Auntie Jillian is Wyatt’s mommy, and right now, he’s still living in her tummy. He won’t have a birthday until July because he’s only 20 weeks along. The doctor’s found out last week that Wyatt’s heart is a very special heart – the left side of his heart isn’t growing like it should. His special heart has a big name; Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome or HLHS. It’s actually the worst ouchie a baby can be born with on its heart, (the most severe congenital heart defect). If it doesn’t get fixed then HLHS is 100% fatal.

Wyatt’s Mommy & Daddy love him more than anything and have decided to let the doctors try to put a band aid on his heart (there is no current cure for HLHS) so that he can hopefully do all of the things that I’m doing now like chasing my dogs and playing in the park; But before he can do those things he is going to have to have three big heart surgeries, all before he is two years old! The first one will have to be only a few days after he is born. Mommy says that also means expensive hospital stays, time off of work for Wyatt’s family, lots of different kinds of costly medicines, special doctors and a lot of extra care and love.

We all want Wyatt to be born with the healthy heart that he deserves. It gave Mommy an idea; If we can’t fix his heart we can at least raise money and awareness so that the doctor’s can!

My family believes in the importance of helping others, especially when its people we love. Mommy, Daddy and I agree that helping Wyatt get a healthy heart is one of the most important things we’ve ever raised money or donated our time for. Would you please consider making a donation for Wyatt’s heart? (I’d sell candy bars at your door, but Mommy says I’m too little for that and everyone is always on a diet anyways.)

My Mommy & Daddy have linked up an account to theirs for Baby Wyatt’s Heart Contribution. (Setting up a trust required lots of paperwork & LAWYERS and we’re just not that fancy!) They said that we have some very special family and friends that would probably help us out.

All money received for Baby Wyatt will be placed into a savings hold account for him in my Mommy and Daddy’s name at the Bank of America Newbury Park Branch until it is sent to Wyatt. The bank said this was the best way to set this up, since we're asking only close family and friends and because this isn't a foundation. Because Wyatt is a minor and not born yet, setting up an actual Trust account will get very tricky. But we gladly will receive whatever contribution you are willing to make for this cause be it pennies or dollars - and pinky swear we are not planning to buy a new car or go to Disneyland with the money.

No amount is too little, just like no heart ever is!
Thank you for your help on behalf of all of us! – Sullivan Curtis

My little cupcake

I'm not usually a "birthday party" kind of person. I prefer low key, small family and friend types of affairs. maybe a nice dinner, some drinks, nothing ever big. I've been going back and forth about what I wanted to do for Sullivan's 1st birthday. Shaun and I are planning to take that Friday off(his official birthday) and take him to the Santa Barbara zoo. I'm excited because he loves animals so much, and it will be so nice to celebrate the day just the three of us.

But I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do for his party, if one at all. I mean its just turning 1 - he won't remember it and its for the adults and parents in his life anyways. I thought about not doing one at all to just having a very small dinner with us my sister and grandparentals. Then again, he's our first baby and he's turning ONE - and we love any good excuse to throw a good bash. So what the eff, right?!

So I started brainstorming ideas for cute party ideas. I seriously considered a theme party, but my sister not being a huge fan and also the person who will single handed help me pull this things all together - I took her advice and steered clear of any cartoon/tv/character themes.

Originally we had planned for a hockey party but ultimately decided that would be better to do in a couple years when all the kids are older and can skate at the ice rink.

My sister and I have been into making cupcakes the past year - really cute cupcakes if I do say so myself. We've made them for holidays, parties, neighborhood street parties, work, birthdays - you name it. I came across this cake pan at Target and decided Sully's party would be a cupcake party!

We're hoping to get it to look something like this - at least thats the goal. This cupcake tower is probably way nicer than nay one we'll be pulling off, but we're going to give it a valiant effort - minus the creepy baby Elmo sucking his finger.





This is the birthday set that I decided on ordering for the party and the colors we'll end up doing. It's really hard to find cute Birthday settings for boys. I ended up finding this one at www.1stwishes.com.

My sister and I plan on tapping into my old preschool teaching days and are going to make homemade play dough, which I'm very excited about. We're going to make them into cupcakes of course. We'll leave the base color for the bottom part of the "cupcake" and use colored play dough to form and make the tops. We're planning on wrapping them up in cellophane with some colored ribbon and a little tag with instructions on how to make your own homemade play dough. I love the smell of homemade play dough. It can last for months if you seal it correctly when done playing with it and remember to refrigerate it. Plus the cost is close to nothing (I bet most of you already have all the ingredients in your kitchens) and theres no extra additives.

On my search for all things cupcake (okay, okay I guess this ended up having a theme after all, but its cute!) I found these really awesome things called cupcake pops.


Usually when we bake we also will do homemade caramel candy, brittle or chocolate covered pretzels, so this isn't too far off from things that we're use to working with. The recipe seems simple enough, I just hope we can make ours come out as pretty first time through. I've decided to use this as the edible centerpieces on the tables. I plan on picking up some cute outdoor buckets at the 99 cent store and sticking them in some styrofoam with some cute colorful bag filler on the tops.

We decided for spacial reason to have the party at the park. We can accommodate the 30-40 guests we're expecting nicely. The park has walking paths (we told everyone to bring bikes/wagons/skates/whatever!) two really nice playgrounds, lots of trees and hills and a duck pond right next to the pavilion we're planning on having it at. I decided to make "duck food" for the kiddos. I've been collecting and drying out bread scraps the past couple of weeks and we'll mix it all together and put them in cute little bags for all the kids to keep them busy for awhile. I'm buying a couple big bouncy balls, hula hoops and maybe a kite or two for some of the older kids or the young adults at heart. If its warm enough we'll probably invest in some water guns too.

I'm also making cutouts of cupcakes from extra scrapbooking paper that I have. I'm hoping that it can keep some of our adult friends busy and everyone can write down a birthday wish for Sully that I can put into his ongoing scrapbook I've been working on.

And lastly, I just got Sully's birthday invites the other night from Shutterfly. ( They have super fast delivery!) I got 25 personalized cards with Sully's picture for only $21 bucks! They let you stack coupon deals - always a plus. It was my first time ordering but I'm pretty happy with the quality of the product they make. I'm really excited to send them out this weekend. I've put mailing them on hold because we've been in the process of getting a very special letter request to go with the cards. In lieu of any kind of gift , we're asking for all of our friends and family to make a donation to a heart trust we're currently in the process of setting up for my dear friends son. He's not due til July, but the doctors discovered he has some serious complications to his heart that will require multiple surgeries. We want to help so we decided to take the opportunity of raising money at Sully's birthday. Once we have the account set up, I'll be posting the information with the letter on here, so be sure to check back!

OOoooooOOOO the excitement!