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Featured
Know Your Buddy Book Kit
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WELCOME TO THE SHADOW BUDDIES FOUNDATION |
Thursday, September 11, 2008 -- 13th Annual "Team Shadow Buddies - Scoring a Victory for Children" Event!
Emerging as one of the best events in Kansas City, the fund-raiser supports life-changing work of the Shadow Buddies Foundation and the Tony Gonzalez Foundation. The event will once again be held at the Sheraton Hotel Overland Park from 6:00-10:00 p.m. with Silent and Live Auction, Dinner and Entertainment.
One of the most difficult things about being a child with a chronic condition is the isolation of being different. The loss of ability to function as a normal child - to run and play and skip and roughhouse - robs these children of normal lives and true friends. Family most certainly helps, but it's friends that share the fears and frustrations and confidences. Friends just like them.
Shadow BuddiesTM have been designed to be both "The friend like me" and a teaching tool. Working with medical professionals, Shadow BuddiesTM have been designed as warm, huggable Buddies for boys and girls that take the place of friends who cannot be around when needed most. Shadow BuddiesTM are also condition specific, demonstrating anatomically the physical results of treating a particular condition.
Shadow Buddies TM may be used as a psychological bridge to span the gap between treatment and awareness. When seen first on their "Buddy", a scar, catheter or even a stoma has far less impact. A teaching tool as well, Shadow Buddies TM are useful as a means of demonstrating basic care.
Shadow Buddies TM help children, their siblings and family cope with their condition. This in turn makes it easier for health professionals to provide appropriate, successful treatment.
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One the left hand of each Shadow Buddy is a special mark, a child's thumbprint. The thumbprint belongs to a very special person named Miles, the inspiration for Shadow Buddies. Here is the story behind the thumbprint as told by Miles mom, Marty Postlethwait.
Born prematurely with mid-line congenital birth defects, Miles was subjected to various procedures and operations from infancy. My life of mothering him was filled with long days (and nights) in the hospital rooms, doctor's offices and recovery waiting rooms.
When Miles was about four, I met him in the recovery room after a particularly long surgery and leaned over him, as mothers do, whispering his name, urging him awake, letting him know that I was there, that I loved him, and asking if he was okay. In the drugged half-sleep that still held him, I didn't know what, or if, he had heard me. Suddenly, a movement caught my eye beside his still form. It was a thumb- Miles' thumb- poking up from beneath the white sheets. It was his answer to my whispers, his sign to me that he heard me, and that yes, he was okay. Thumbs up. Everything was okay, Mom.
And so it became our sign, and now the sign of Shadow Buddies. On each Buddy's left hand is found Miles' thumbprint, the special Shadow Buddy trademark, and every child who owns a buddy now owns a part of Miles as well.
It is fitting that his print is there, because it was Miles who came up with the idea for Shadow Buddies. As you might imagine, heart surgery can be a long, lonely ordeal. After one of his surgeries, Miles asked for a friend, 'someone just like me.' Consequently, the first of the Buddies- the Heart Buddy- complete with scar and mended heart was born.
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The Shadow Buddies Foundation -
14700 West 107th Street, Suite 100 -
Lenexa, Kansas 66215
Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
