(be sure to bring the event flyer on June 7) 

Vegas friends, Celebrate the last day of school with us and help us raise money for the Little Miss Hannah Foundation!

20% of all food purchases will go towards LMHF.
June 7th – 11 am to 1:00 am – ALL DAY!

Many of our LMHF families’ brothers and sisters end up spending a lot of time at home due to the constraints of the medical lifestyle of their medically fragile sibling.

With YOUR help, we can help provide them with entertainment during this hot summer and well into the 2013!

Get ready for summer by cleaning out your kids’ no-longer-used DVDs, video games, and books and bring them down to the TGI Fridays on Sunset in Henderson! Our donation bin will be there through our big fundraising event on June 7th (make sure you bring the flyer!)

TGI Fridays #1140
4330 East Sunset Road
Henderson, NV

We are looking for the following items:    DVDs (PG13 and under), Books (for ages 4 to 17), and Video Games and Accessories for both handheld and console systems (such as Wii, Xbox – all versions, Nintendo DS and 3DS, PSP, Playstation (version 2 & 3), and Leapster.

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If you are out of the area and want to donate your kids gently-used media items, please mail them to:

Little Miss Hannah Foundation
10624 South Eastern Avenue, Suite A847
Henderson, NV 89052

All these items will be given to our medically fragile children and their siblings.

http://www.littlemisshannah.org/TGIF_LMHF_June7_Flyer.pdf – flyer for the event

SAVE THE DATE!
July 25th, 5:30 pm to 9:00 pm – District at Green Valley

Please come out on July 25th to celebrate our kick-off event for our Little Miss Hannah Foundation.  It would mean so much to our family to have our friends come join us in this celebration – which is also Hannah’s 4th birthday!

At the 7:30 pm balloon release that evening, we will be singing Happy Birthday to her and releasing balloons to her. Would love to have our friends joining in this release for Hannah!  This 7:30 pm balloon release is dedicated to all the children who have fought so hard but passed away too soon due to disease or traumatic event.

We are taking over the entire District at Green Valley in Henderson and working on creating a night of family fun including music, dancing, face painting, store and restaurant discounts, and our highlighted event – balloon releases to the sky (hence, the “rainbow”)

Please save the date and join us that night!   For more details, please check out our event page, and I will be sharing more here in my blog as it gets closer.

We have some incredible items available for auction and raffles!  Our featured auction items include:

• Four VIP tickets to see Brad Garrett at the MGM plus a meet-n-greet with Brad
• Four VIP tickets to see Ray Romano at the Mirage plus a meet-n-greet with Ray

*** If you wish to donate an item for the raffle and/or want information on becoming a sponsor for this event, please contact me! ***

Saturday was the Ronald McDonald House Charities 5k/1m event here in Las Vegas.

When we first started coming up with a game plan for our Little Miss Hannah Organization, one of our main goals was to be able to support those organizations that meant so much to us during Hannah’s journey.   The Ronald McDonald House was a huge one, as I spent 30 days living there while Daddy and the kids were moving across country from Texas to Vegas.

My sister-in-law and I were hoping to get a team of at least 20 people.    Between my sister-in-law, a friend, and my friends, we had almost 70 participants in the run!    Crazy, I know!!   We actually had the second or third largest team of the day.

It was just incredible to see so many people, even ones I didn’t even know, wearing their LMHF sunshine-heart logo shirts with my little girl’s picture on the back.

I will admit, I had a moment when after our team picture was taken and all the people were walking towards the start of the race, my stomach felt a little weird seeing so many people with Hannah’s picture on the back.  It was one of those “that’s MY baby girl” moments, so I did step away from our booth for about 10 minutes just to regroup and refocus.

We had a booth at the event so that we could start sharing our mission and our goals with the community.  Right now, the only people who know us are the ones that KNOW our family or friends of our family.   I’m not very experienced at doing the booth thing, but I think I did okay.

There were a handful of people that we met who you could tell just understood what we wanted to do and volunteered to help. THAT was one of the best parts of the morning ~ seeing a complete stranger believe in something that you feel so strongly about.

We handed out about 200 of our postcards along with fliers for our TGI Friday’s fundraiser on June 7th.

We are definitely going to do it again next year.  We even met some runners there who want to join our team for next year.    Maybe we can be the largest team!

But it definitely and positively served its purpose.   We raised over $1200 for our local Ronald McDonald House and we also gave us a chance to get out there and share our organization.

You HAVE to check out the pictures ~ so inspiring and fun!

We are putting together our Abigail’s Angels program, and we need your help! This program is designed to give the brothers and sisters of a child affected with a rare life-limiting disease some extra attention, emotional support, and help the parents while they juggle the special needs of their ill child and trying to keep an active lifestyle for their healthy children.

If you have a child with a rare life-limiting disease who have brothers and sisters under 18 years of age living at home, we would love to talk to you to see what type of programs you would like to see! We also want to speak to those families who have a children living at home with hospice or palliative care who have siblings at home with them.

We appreciate your help! Please send us an email, and we will send you the survey.

You can learn more about our mission at http://littlemisshannah.org/our-mission

The Little Miss Hannah Foundation is officially in business.

I can’t tell you how AMAZING this feels.  Hannah’s legacy is real.  It is tangible.  It is “in the books.”

We have done SO much work on the setup of our organization, and there is still so much more to be done before we can start serving families.  We have our second board meeting tomorrow night, and I’m so proud to have such a great group of friends and family here in Vegas who believe in what we want to do.  People who want to be involved, want to help, and most of all, people who want to see us succeed.

The next steps include obtaining our 501c3 status, our tax-exempt status.  My uncle and his law firm have agreed to do this incredibly complicated (for us) paperwork for us pro bono.  Pro bono!  My husband and I started doing it on our own, and it was so confusing and overwhelming!   I feel so blessed that his firm also believes in our mission and what we want to accomplish.

This is validation.  Validation that no matter how hard it gets or how much I miss her that her short time here with us had a bigger purpose.  She will always be “my baby.”  But by working with other families who are living the life we did when Hannah was with us, maybe we can provide some comfort where there was none if Hannah wasn’t who she was.

I’m so proud of you little girl.  I’m proud to be able to share your story and talk about you every day, many times a day.  I’m proud that you have taught me so much and that I LISTENED to your lessons.   I’m proud that people who were are now strangers to us will soon be endeared to you.

I’m proud to be your mom.

I love you baby girl.