We're Getting Closer To Our $3,000 Goal!

We've received 43 donations, totally $1,795. Thank you for your prayers and financial support, as Jen and Kathy prepare for the trip to Haiti. Please continue to share information about our non-profit organization with friends and family who have a heart for providing for orphans. Can't wait to share information with you about the trip to Haiti!

Thank You For Your Support!

We've had 30 different donors provide $1,480 so far, as of Monday morning. Thank you, one and all! We're moving toward our goal of $3,000 or more from 50 or more donors. We're so thankful for the opportunity to be part of Global Giving. We're also getting excited about the opportunity to travel to Haiti very soon!

Thank you for your prayers and financial support. Please share our link with family and friends who have a heart for orphans who haven't found their forever families, yet.

Global Giving

The Red Thread Promise has a wonderful opportunity, and now the work begins! We need your help! Global Giving is an organization where donors are matched with organizations doing work on behalf of children and families in need. Global Giving has reviewed The Red Thread Promise, and has allowed us to join their program, but to remain with Global Giving, we need to raise $3,000 from 50 different donors by May 11th!

We would appreciate any donation that you are able to provide. Due to needing multiple donors, you can see that a donation of $5 is as important as a donation of $25. Each will help us to meet the goal of raising $3,000 with a minimum of 50 donors by May 11th.

Please click on the Global Giving button on the sidebar to add your support to our mission in Haiti. Thank you!

You Can Support Our Trip to Haiti by Supplying...

items such as Children's Tylenol, Infant Tylenol, Children's Motrin, Desitin, Lotion, Soap, and Toothpaste. For friends and family that follow our blog, you know our contact information to get items to us. To our new friends, that we haven't met in person yet, please post a comment and let us know how to contact you. We'll let you know where to send the items so we can have them packed before leaving for Haiti.

A Sad Day for The Red Thread Promise

We received word that Ping died in his sleep. The Red Thread Promise would like to thank those that donated the funds needed for his recent surgery. Through your generosity, doctors tried to repair his heart. As you know, they couldn't complete all procedures, as they had hoped. Thank you for helping us provide for Ping's medical needs.

Recent View of Jacob Beachy's Sensory Trail at McKenna Farm

Look at That Smile!

We received this photo of Hua, the premature baby that had been abandoned last January. We were happy to be able to provide for his medical needs. What an incredible smile! Check the blog archives for Hua, and you'll see what he looked like earlier in this year.

More About Preston

Preston receives physical therapy and is progressing from using a walker, to using crutches as his primary means of walking.
This will afford him greater ease in negotiating everyday obstacles. A walker is very stable for him but the therapy provides him a means to develop his own balance. We look forward to hearing that he's moving around his classroom with crutches!

Jacob's Fund/TRTP is helping to meet some of the cost of his therapy at McKenna Farms.

Jacob's Fund

Jacob's family wanted to honor him by teaming with The Red Thread Promise, to provide for the needs of other children. Jacob had benefitted from Hippotherapy, and Jacob's Fund has helped with the cost of Hippotherapy, for two additional children; Cole and Preston.

Jacob's Story: Told by His Grandmother, Glenna

“We’re having a boy!” Our daughter, Sarah, had written an e-mail, but we could hear her thrilled voice as if she were with us.

She and her husband, Josh, had a little girl. Elyse was four, sweet, playful, and the baby of the family. She had two cousins, our older daughter’s son, Evan, and his sister, Brookie.

Bernie and I had looked forward to having a big happy family, and when Sarah became pregnant the second time, it looked as if we were about to have the perfect family.

Our new grandson was due May 21, 2004. At the end of March we visited a friend in Florida. I kept in touch with both our daughters whenever we traveled. I called Sarah, reached her voicemail, and left a message. We didn’t hear from her that week.

When we returned we learned why. Sarah called and told me she had her sister, Mary, on the line. She had something to tell us and she could only bear to say what she had to say once.

She’d gone for a checkup the week before; during the exam the doctor discovered something unusual about her baby boy’s heartbeat. She’d gone to a specialist immediately and learned that the baby’s heart was malformed.

“But they are sure they can correct it,” she told us. “As soon as he’s born they’ll do surgery.”

When he was born, Sarah held Jacob for a few minutes before he was whisked away to another hospital. We stood in the hallway outside the delivery room. As the little cart with life support attachments that held our baby boy passed us, it stopped and we were allowed a glimpse.

“He’s a good-looking guy, isn’t he?” Bernie said. What he was really saying was much more than that.

Jacob Noah Beachy spent most of the first month of his life in the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit. The surgery wasn’t done immediately; doctors wanted his heart to grow some first.

When Jacob came home he was receiving nourishment through a tube. Though they didn’t say why, the medical staff had urged Sarah to begin feeding him with a bottle even though he wouldn’t be able to take much. She’d planned to nurse him, but his intake needed to be measured. Only much later did she learn about babies who failed to learn to eat and thus languished when the feeding tube was removed.

Sarah fed Jacob with the bottle, held him, loved him, and handled him with care, as did Josh. Elyse, on the other hand, tickled, played, wrestled and talked to him like the little brother he was. She was never rough with him but treated him as the playmate she’d been waiting for.

His biggest smiles were for her. They were best friends. She looked out for him. And he adored her.

Jacob’s first open-heart surgery came early in 2005. We had no illusions; the risk was enormous for our tiny boy. We held our breath until we knew he was all right.

In spring 2006 Jacob underwent another surgery. We prayed, and through the requests of family and friends, churches across the country kept him constantly in their prayers.

The second surgery was successful; two down and one to go.

Jacob was two then. He began hippotherapy that same spring. Hippotherapy is speech, physical and occupational therapy delivered while a child is riding a horse. It’s a therapy that cannot be reproduced in any other setting. Anyone who’s had a child in pediatric therapy knows that it’s hard work. But the movement of the horse helps children with balance and motor skills.

Two common threads run through parents’ stories about their child’s hippotherapy sessions: they can hardly get the child off the horse at the end of the session, and their child’s speech skills improve dramatically. The kids don’t say much while riding, but after the session, it’s like opening a floodgate. That certainly was the case with Jacob. He’d hold lengthy conversations (for a three-year-old), talking about riding his horse, Major.

My heart soared and swelled to near bursting when I saw him walk for the first time. Once when I came to visit he greeted me at the door with, “Look, Grandma – I run.” And he ran to the kitchen.

His vocabulary grew quickly to include quesadilla and pedometer. And he told me the names of everyone in the family: Sissy Noah Beachy, Mommy Noah Beachy, Daddy Noah Beachy.

Jacob was love itself – he brought joy and laughter into any room he entered.

In June, 2007, Jacob went into the hospital for the procedure that would make the final repair to his heart. The surgery went well and Jacob was recovering on schedule. After a few days doctors removed a drainage tube from his chest. They discovered a small herniated area and decided to perform surgery to correct it.

During that surgery Jacob contracted MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant staph infection. The next six weeks can only be described as a living hell.

Jacob died on July 21, 2007. He was exactly 38 months old.