Mark your calendars!

Saturday, April 25, 2009
9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Family Church
11135 W Kellogg
Wichita, KS

$45 per seat and that includes lunch, dinner, goodie bag, freebies, shared tool station and chance to win door prizes from a slew of great scrapbooking companies, like McGill and Creative Memories!

Grand prize is a Provo Craft Cricut!

You'll want to register quick because we've limited space to just 75 scrappers—gotta protect that elbow room.

They'll be more details in the coming weeks, too—stayed tuned.

To register by phone, contact Christy Freeman at 620-584-2966 or e-mail her at christycmc@sktc.net. To register online, visit www.scrappinbootcamp.com!

For those of you who attended the Kyrie Krop 2008, any comments that you'd like to share? I'm sure some crafters are trying to make decisions about which crops they'll attend this year, and your feedback could help invite new people to the cause!

Also, we still have room for vendors! We're open to anything in which caring women would be interested. Pampered Chef? Sure. Scrapbook stuff? Yep. Cosmetics, candles, jewelry? Yes, yes, yes.

Also, the design you see at the top of this post will be the design on the t-shirt that you can purchase at Scrappin' Boot Camp. Scrappers love their event t-shirts!

To inspire you.

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
—Randy Pausch

You many heard about or seen snippets of "The Last Lecture." We mentioned it here on Kyrie's blog last year. It is the moving final lecture of a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Given just months left in his life, he gave this lecture on "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," which, as a Kyrie Foundation patron, you will clearly see that it's about so much more than that.

You can watch the entire hour-long lecture here courtesy of You Tube or you can visit Carnegie Mellon's site to view. As for me, I downloaded it to my iPod via iTunes. It's definitely something I want to watch several times. Hope you find that to be true, too.

Thankful Thursday.

Today I'm thankful for winter. Winter gets a bad rap, doesn't it? Everybody typically wishes for some other season than that of Jack Frost. And if you don't live near a tobogganing hill, ski resort or hot chocolate factory, it's difficult to find winter's gifts.

I'm thankful for winter because it is the season of rest. (Or at least it should be.) By nature's example, winter is a time of hibernation, of long nights meant to usher sweet dreams and recuperation. Trees and, thankfully, grass and mosquitoes go dormant—to rest and ready for the blazing growth of spring & summer. I'm thankful for flannel and crock pot suppers and time spent fireside and for winter's ability to push people together, be it in a snow-locked airport or around an ice fishing hole or snuggled on the couch. I'm thankful that winter is the annual reminder of how well this world was made.

What are you thankful for today?

Save the date!

For all you paper crafters out there, save Saturday, April 25 for the 2009 Kyrie Foundation Krop! We'll announce more details and open registration soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, though, if you know anyone who would like to be a vendor for the day (scrapbooking, candles, Pampered Chef, cosmetics, etc.), please feel free to e-mail Christy Freeman at christycmc@sktc.net or 316-584-2966.

Thankful Thursday.

I thought of something really good last night that I was thankful for, and then 40 winks washed it away. So today I'm thankful for memory.

I'm thankful that when it comes to remembering, the mind prefers quality over quantity, like the ol' adage: it's not the days of your life but the life in your days. This equalizes the length of everyone's life, no matter if our time here is short or long, which is how a 19-month-old child can have as much impact or more than a 72-year-old man.

Memory celebrates carpe diem, like bravely facing a new challenge, and one-to-one experiences, like learning to embroider with your mother and snippets of the everyday, like the smell of dryer sheets. We remember verbal exchanges that have stunned our senses, and we cherish the idiosyncratic patterns of those we love. This whole wad of life's souvenirs is housed in the cells of our brains, and I like to think, in the vibrations of our souls. What a miracle that something abstract and fleeting can be contained and recalled in a physical organ. Absolutely amazing. I like to think that your memory is the church of yourself, where you go pay homage to yesterday and offer up the happenings of today.

All of these butterfly moments are haphazardly collected in our little brain cubbies. And thank God for that. Thank God for all the memories and the ability to keep them. Even the ones that you wish you could forget. Even the one that cause today's tears--the tears mean that you care and caring is why we're here.

What are you thankful for today?

Thankful Thursday

Today I'm thankful for those around us that make us better. Maybe it's an energetic and positive friend, a parent who provides an example of strength and kindness or a child that reminds us what we are all capable of becoming. What are you thankful for today?

Hello 2009.

Here we are. The swill of January upon us.

Changing the calender, especially from last year, has offered a breath of hope— the inhale of goodness, a cleansing exhale, refreshed for whatever is next.

I don't know about you, but I've always thought that song "Auld Lang Syne" sounds terribly sad. The festivities of New Year's party horns belie that melancholy, tinny horn we hear in that song's traditional rendition. While there is joy for so many during the holiday season, simultaneously others are kept company by sadness and ache, like bruised fruit, especially when something—or rather someone—is missing. And when the world changes the current year, time suddenly contains a cruel distance, too.

This year is going to be really special for The Kyrie Foundation. We've met so many new people in the last year who have jumped on board and offered their help that 2009 is marked for even more success (hey! we still need volunteers & ideas, though. plenty of room for more help!). I know that there will be lots of opportunities to introduce Kyrie and the foundation to new people, which is super-great, but recently, there has been a nagging fret that pangs when I say "2009." That's because when I tell someone about Kyrie's story, I tell them about what happened in 2007. Now that we're in 2009 and especially since the foundation is growing so well (thanks to you!), there's an assumption that everything's okay. That we're all excited and happy--huzzah!

The thing is okay, excited and happy are all relative states. We're okay except for the giant, gaping pothole in all of our hearts. We're excited to be a part of curing this unfair & vicious disease. We're happy that someday, we all will be in a place where cancer doesn't even exist.

At the Wichita Baby Fare last year, a woman came up to our booth and asked us how we had the courage to do this, to take on all this work and live with the idea of babies fighting brain cancer every day. That notion had never occurred to me. She went on to share that she lost a daughter 12 years ago to pediatric brain cancer, and we could clearly see that for her heart 12 years ago was the same as today. Just like how 2 years ago is the same as today for us. Time doesn't heal all wounds. In some cases, time just allows you to develop a new level of pain tolerance.

With all of that in our gullet, I still feel a bubbling of determination when looking forward to the strides that we—all of us, including you, our dear reader—are going to make on behalf of children everywhere this year. Hello, 2009. I'd like you to meet The Kyrie Foundation.