When Randy was going through cancer treatments early in his life, Make A Wish sent him to Disney World as his wish. While he would go there several more times throughout the course of his life, the Make A Wish trip was bittersweet. When someone offers to send your kid somewhere because they’re considered “terminally ill”, it’s already going to be an emotional trip.
And parts of it were. Any time you see terminally ill children, it never leaves you. However, there were good things about that trip too. The “wish” part meant that they flew us down there, rented us a car, gave us free tickets to Disney World, and let us stay at their compound that was specifically built for Wish kids called Give Kids The World. It was a long time ago and Randy was not in the best of health at the time, but we really did make the best of it and had a great time.
Some years later, while we were on yet another Disney trip, we decided to see if we could visit Give Kids The World. Jordan and James had never seen the place, so we wanted to take them there and let them see what we got to experience almost 15-17 years earlier. And the Give Kids The World people couldn’t have been nicer to us. We got to play mini golf, look around the place to see how it had changed, and even had free ice cream at their completely-free-to-all ice cream shop.
My favorite part of visiting Give Kids The World that day was getting to see the star that they hang on the ceiling for all the kids that have ever stayed there. It was really cool that they commemorate all the kids. And their stars hang there forever. We didn’t even know they did that, but we immediately asked where we could find Randy’s star. The picture at the top of this post was taken inside that building where we went to look at his star. And Randy’s star still hangs there to this day. I’m glad the 5 of us got to see Randy’s shining star together at least once in our lifetimes….
For the love of Randy... 