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From the Chicago Sun-Times
Helping parents of sick children
Act of kindness
January 15, 2008
After being diagnosed with bone cancer, Melissa Fragen spent 20 months in and out of hospitals.
Her single mom, Patricia Fragen, was at her side the entire time. When Melissa spent 30 days in the ICU at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Patricia was out of the hospital a total of just nine hours.
A friend walked her dogs, watered her plants and picked up her mail.
Melissa died last April. In her memory, Patricia has started a not-for-profit group to do similar favors for other families. Volunteers will do non-baby-sitting chores, such as mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, shoveling the sidewalk, picking up meals, feeding the cat.
The organization's slogan is "helping parents of children with critical illnesses share more normal moments every day."
For more information, go online to www.normalmoments.org.
“Helping parents of sick children.”Act of Kindness. Chicago Sun-Times. January 15, 2008. Sun-Times News Group. January 15, 2008.
***Correction to the article: While we do not actually deliver meals, we do provide “meal accounts” at the restaurant (delivery or pick-up) of a Family’s choice.***
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 Here’s another simple way to help raise funds for Normal Moments. When you purchase a new telephone or renew your cell phone contract, visit http://www.phonesforgood.com/pfg/go/308 to do your business. Whether you are with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Nextel, you can take care of all your purchases & contract upgrades/renewas at Phones for Good and have a significant portion of your purchase help support the families assisted by Normal Moments.
 An easy way to help Normal Moments is through a new Yahoo!-powered search engine and online shopping mall called GoodSearch. GoodSearch will make a donation to Normal Moments every time you search the internet and every time you purchase something at one of their partner merchants. Currently available merchants include Target, Gap, ebay, Macy’s, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble and hundreds more! There is no additional cost to you — the money comes from the advertisers and the stores. When you shop online, start with GoodSearch!
The more people who use this site, the more money will go to those in need. So please spread the word to your friends and family.
Here are the web sites — http://www.goodsearch.com and http://www.goodshop.com. You can also read about GoodSearch in the NY Times, Oprah Magazine, CNN, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal.
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Meet our friend, Emilio. He is 3 years old and being treated for a form of leukemia (ALL). He has a long road ahead of him, so we are planning to do all we can to help his Mom and Dad so that they can spend lots of quality time with Emilio and his big sister.
When Teresa (Mom) found Normal Moments, she had been in the hospital non-stop with Emilio for 3 weeks while the staff tried to determine the source of his lingering fever. With her husband at home caring for their daughter, there was no one really looking out for Teresa. Her father had visited and brought food a couple of times, but other than that, she was subsisting on an occasional bag of chips from the vending machines. Normally a two-income home, now reduced to one partial income so that both children have parental support, paying for take-out just wasn’t an option. That’s where we stepped in, allowing Teresa to select a few of the delivery restaurants that serve Hope Christ Children’s Hospital, where Emilio is in treatment, so that we could make arrangements with them for Teresa to have food delivered at her convenience and to her liking, so that she can maintain her strength while helping Emilio get through this rough patch. This is an awfully long stay for such a young man, and both his and his mother’s patience are being tested on a regular basis. When you add hungry to tired and worried, it does not add up to the best circumstances for coping. We are hoping that we have helped build a better equation for Teresa and Emilio.
Once they headed back home, we arranged for housekeeping and will arrange for lawn-care assistance in the spring so that when everyone is together, they can spend their time just being a family.
For more information on Emilio see his Caring Bridge site.
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