Support Jackson in his journey… and win!

You may have already heard of 9 year-old Jackson; a lot of special needs bloggers have been mentioning him lately. Jackson’s mum, Gina, is the owner of the website Special Happens. Her eldest son has a number of obstacles to overcome – he has cerebral palsy, is on the autism spectrum, has sensory processing disorder and also has epilepsy. The latter causes him to be affected by sub-clinical seizures 100% of the time. So, next week, Jackson faces his biggest obstacle to date: a hemispherectomy. You can read more about it here, but suffice it to say, this is both rare and very major, surgery.

The Jackson’s Journey site details lots of ways you can help this young man and his family but here’s how I’m encouraging you to help (with incentives to encourage participation)! :

• Create a card for Jackson using any iOS app
• Email it to me at babyomum@live.com with the subject heading “Jackson’s Journey”
• Don’t have an iOS device? No problem; create a paper card and scan or take a picture of it and email me the jpg file.
• If you create a paper card you can also mail it to Jackson – check here for details.

These drawings will not just be used to cheer Jackson up during his hospital stay and rehab, they will be used during his therapy post-surgery. Here’s some information about Jackson’s favourite things for you to incorporate in your artwork if you can:

• Trains
• Balloons
• Dinosaurs
• Retro cop cars
• Funny hats
• The colour blue
• Rainbows

Need some app suggestions?

• CreateACard by KidsAndBeyond
• iLuv Drawing Dinosaurs or any of the iLuv Drawing apps!
• Draw Along with Stella and Sam by zincRoe (FREE right now!)
• Let’s Color! by Lazoo

As I mentioned, for those of you that email me a card, there are also some giveaways on my Facebook page that you can enter here. I have set up two rafflecopters so that those without an iOS device can enter to win the giftcard. You can enter both rafflecopters using the same email if you want to try and win the apps as well as the giftcard. The prizes are:

• A $10 gift certificate for iTunes, Target or Amazon from KidsAndBeyond. Oliver drew an awesome Father’s Day card – I entered a contest with it and we won a gift certificate from this developer. They have kindly agreed to let me use this as an incentive to get folks to create art for Jackson!
• One app from KidsAndBeyond (your choice) and a copy each of 123 Kids Fun All In One and 123 Kids Fun Alphabet
• a copy each of 123 Kids Fun All In One and 123 Kids Fun Alphabet

Jackson’s surgery is scheduled for Friday. I’m collating as many cards as I can, so I can put them altogether in a video that he can watch before then. Gina has passed along some of Jackson’s favourite music so hopefully he thinks the video is fun. I’ll also post it on the blog once it’s done. To kick things off, I’ve made a card using the CreateACard and DesignStudio apps:

So, get creating and enter the giveaways!