Last Saturday, November 5th, the girls and I participated in the annual JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes. It was held at Tempe Town Lake in Tempe, AZ. This years theme was Blast off For a Cure. This was our 2nd year participating as a family team. It seems that I participated in this walk something like 8 years ago with a friend of mine who's husband was with the Ford Motors company team. (I mentioned this last year when I posted about the 2010 walk, but ironically, at this JDRF walk 8 years ago, is when I first annouced to my friends that I was pregnant with Kortnie).
Our family walk team is called Kortnie's Krusaders. This year we have raised a total of $1049. We got online donations from family and friends, the girls went door to door and sold some of the JDRF paper shoes and they made over $100 that way. My friend Becca Martin donated a Photo Session and we raffled that off, we made around $215 with that.
This year, my husband just wasn't able to get off of work to come with us, so we asked his mom to watch our son, and my girls and I went down for the walk and made it into a girls weekend. We left Friday afternoon after school to drive down. It's about a 3 1/2 hour drive for us. We got to the Valley and did some shopping at the craft store and Trader Joe's, then we went to our hotel, we got some dinner and sat in bed and watched Wizard of Oz. Saturday morning the day of the walk was pretty cold for the Phoenix area. It was in the 40's, cloudy, a bit windy, and dark. Definitly not the sunny warm day we were hoping for, but the rain stayed away so that was great. We opted to do the 1.5 mile Family Fun Walk rather than the 3 mile. Kortnie really wanted to do the 3 mile walk, but about 1/2 a mile into the shorter walk she was already tired of walking, so it's a good thing we did the shorter walk.
There were tons booths and fun things to do. Before the walk we saw some local news and radio guys on the stage, we did a Zumba warm up and we visited a few vendor tables both before and after, afterwards the girls were able to paint pumpkins and get their faces painted. Kortnie got some sticker/skins for her Accu-Check, she got matching pink skins for her pump/remote. Also two skins for her At the Coke Zero booth you were supposed to answer a question and then drop a ball into a "plinko" like game to get a prize, but they LOVED Kortnie's Diet Coke earrings so they only had her answer one question and then they gave all 3 of us both prizes, a anniversary glass bottle of Coke and a pick from a bucket of other prizes. She actually got tons of compliments on her Diet Coke earrings.
The walk this year happened to be 2 days before Kortnie's 2nd D-aversary (anniversary of diagnosis). I had felt this 2 year mark looming since Halloween. I was kind of feeling in a funk about everything, I even mentioned on Thursday afternoon that I didn't even really want to go to the walk, but we'd planned a girls weekend, my girls did such hard work fundraising, going door to door and selling raffle tickets, that I felt like even though I didn't want to go, that they deserved to go. I'm glad that we went, it was uplifting, the girls had fun, and even though I walked around with tears in my eyes most of the morning, they were good tears and ones that needed to be shed.
After the walk, we did some more shopping and went out for a late lunch before heading home. Walking around Mesa and Gilbert with all 3 of us in matching walk t-shirts and the girls faces painted, we got quite a few questions about where we had been and what we had done that morning and it gave us the oppourtunity to educate and advocate. The cashier at Sam's Club told us his fiance has had Type 1 since she was 4 years old and he even asked Kortnie if she had a pump and then told her it was the same one as his fiance. (the Animas rep also had a Pink Ping, Kortnie loves to see people with the same pump as her, one time at the grocery store here in town, she saw a girl with a green one, and one time at Disneyland we met a girl with a pink one).
So, it was a good day, we were able to raise some money, we had a good time just us girls and my spirits were uplifted some.
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