Chris' 36th birthday this Saturday, February 26th

I probably should have posted this sooner than 6 days before his birthday.  At any rate Chris is turning 36 on the 26th.  

For those that want to send cards or gifts here is our address at the hotel:

Chris Hellberg

Extended Stay Deluxe

1301 S Braeswood Blvd

Houston TX 77030

I've excluded the room # because we may be switching rooms and we will get any mail from the front desk regardless of what room # we are in.

For those that want gift ideas he said he'd enjoy gift cards to Barnes & Noble.

He is a huge West Ham United fan so anything having to do with them he'd love.  Anyone that wants more specific West Ham United gear he'd like shoot me a message.  

And of course he would love an appreciate any sort of gift or card.  

Something else that's pretty simple that he would love is if people folded paper cranes and sent them to him.  

We knew some about the legend of 1,000 paper cranes but until we walked past on of the many waiting rooms at MDA and saw them hanging from the ceiling and read a caption we had no idea they had a connection to leukemia.

The legend goes that a Japanese girl, Sadako Sasaki, who was 2 years old when the bomb was dropped near her home in Hiroshima.  Here is a summary from the wikipedia page found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Sasaki

"Overview

Sadako was at home when the explosion occurred, about one mile from Ground Zero. By November 1954, chicken poxhad developed on her neck and behind her ears. In January 1955, purple spots had formed on her legs. Subsequently, she was diagnosed with leukemia (her mother referred to it as "an atom bomb disease").[1] She was hospitalized on February 21, 1955, and given, at the most, a year to live.

On August 3, 1955, Sadako's best friend Chizuko Hamamoto came to the hospital to visit and cut a golden piece of paper into a square to fold it into a paper crane, in reference to the ancient Japanese story that promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. A popular version of the story is that she fell short of her goal of folding 1,000 cranes, having folded only 644 before her death, and that her friends completed the 1,000 and buried them all with her. This comes from the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. An exhibit which appeared in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum stated that by the end of August, 1955, Sadako had achieved her goal and continued to fold more cranes.[citation needed]

Though she had plenty of free time during her days in the hospital to fold the cranes, she lacked paper. She would use medicine wrappings and whatever else she could scrounge up. This included going to other patients' rooms to ask to use the paper from their get-well presents. Chizuko would bring paper from school for Sadako to use.

During her time in the hospital her condition progressively worsened. Around mid-October her left leg became swollen and turned purple. After her family urged her to eat something, Sadako requested tea on rice and remarked "It's good." Those were her last words. With her family around her, Sadako died on the morning of October 25, 1955 at the age of 12.

Memorial

After her death, Sadako's friends and schoolmates published a collection of letters in order to raise funds to build a memorial to her and all of the children who had died from the effects of the atomic bomb. In 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, also called theGenbaku Dome. "