Lighthouse founder and pediatric nurse Melinda Mayton, of Alpharetta, enjoys a day at the beach with Madie Ice-Canupp, third from right, and other children in fall 2003.

Life is no day at the beach for families with children who have cancer. A week at the beach, however, can help enrich the lives of those children and their families.

Eight times a year, groups of 100 or more metro Atlantans - 12 to 14 sick children, their families and volunteer helpers - hit the beaches of Florida for a free week's vacation sponsored by an Alpharettabased nonprofit agency called Lighthouse Family Retreat.

Regina Ice of Snellville said the trip was the best medicine she and her 5-year-old daughter, Madie Ice-Canupp, had received in a long time. Madie is fighting leukemia, and last summer she wasn't winning the struggle. Her doctor told Ice, "You need a week at the beach."

Yeah, right. Ice is a single parent who works as a business analyst. Her budget had no line item for vacations. But the doctor wrote a prescription for a trip to the beach anyway - he referred the family to Lighthouse.

"It was almost like a lifechanging experience," Ice said. The days away from all things medical left Madie with new color in her cheeks and new lightness in her heart, her mother said. "The trip was almost like a reason for her to get better."

The Ices were invited for a second Lighthouse trip, and this time it was the mother who received the biggest benefit. She took part in parent discussion groups and found herself relating to the fathers who had to hold down jobs with the added stress of their children's illnesses.

"When you go back to work, sometimes people treat you differently," Ice said. "Some people just don't talk to you." The inspiration for Lighthouse Family Retreat came from a question posed in Melinda Mayton's Bible study class: What would you do with a million dollars?

For Mayton, a pediatric nurse who lives in Alpharetta, the answer was easy. She would do something to help the families she saw being overwhelmed, and in some cases torn apart, by a child's cancer diagnosis.

"I would work at the bedsides and see the children get better but the families grow apart," Mayton said.

In such families, divorce is not uncommon, and siblings often suffer emotionally from having their parents focused so much on the sick child, Mayton said.

She then asked herself a question: Why are you waiting for someone to drop a million dollars in your lap before you start doing what you said you wanted to do?

So she started beating the bushes for funds to establish her nonprofit agency. An investment banker said that if she could raise $25,000, he would match it.

About 10 months later, in August 2000, Mayton led the first Lighthouse trip, to Tybee Island. When the first sick child was lifted out of his wheelchair and had his feet dipped into the Atlantic Ocean, his face was transformed and he called out, "Mommy, the water's moving!" Mayton recalled. It was one of those "magic moments," she said.

Since then, her ministry of family healing has grown. Owners of beachfront houses have made them available at deeply reduced rental rates.

Recently, a man who saw the Lighthouse gang in a Fourth of July parade donated two beach-area lots. With that property and the pledges of donated services she has gotten from architects and contractors, Mayton hopes Lighthouse will soon have a permanent place near the beach.