Meals for the Bates Family

As many of you may or may not know, in April, Lauren and Cory learned that their 5 month old, Oliver George, had suffered a perinatal stroke... layman's terms: Oliver suffered a significant stroke sometime between a week before birth, during birth, or a week after birth. As troubling as this news was, it was through their visits with Oliver's neurologist that they discovered Oliver is suffering infantile spasms. Basically, Oliver is enduring continuous seizures due to his stroke. They tried medication alone to stop the seizures but it hasn't proved enough. As Cory recently put it, even Oliver having one seizure means "failure." So now, the Bates have decided to combine that effort with strong doses of steroids to halt all seizing. The negative side effect of the steriods is a weakened immune system (read: Oliver gets a cold then he could end up in the ICU). This means he and the rest of the family are on a kind of modified quarantine... no visitors can come to their house, and they have to carefully limit their own exposure outside of the home. Oliver has a team of medical professionals, multiple therapists, and a huge system of family and friends to support and cheer him on along his journey to first end the seizures and second help develop his neuro pathways.

So I asked Lauren if providing meals would be a help to the family, and we came up with Blue Apron. Its a meal delivery service that will send weekly deliveries to their home with fresh ingredients and recipes so they have a few days a week where they don't have to think about what is for dinner. This will also give them a healthy option. 

I have set up an account on Blue Apron that is under my name and my card. Through this site you can donate by the number of meals you would like to contribute to the Heffners and I will just then pay my account when I recieve the payments. Right now we have set them up to get 2 meals a week for 6 weeks. However if people are wanting to donate more we will either add 2 extra meals a week or pay for a few more weeks for them to have deliveries. 

Thank you all so much for helping out Lauren and Cory, they are very grateful for this and we are so grateful that our family is so loved by so many.