10/24/09, our grandma came into town, for the JDRF

hope gala! But, the thing was, Austin is still sick!

Amber got selected as a Children’s Congress delegate!  We’ll be heading to Washington, DC, this June to participate!

 On May 6th, 2008, the Walk Awards banquet was held at Hy-Vee Corportate Conference Center.  Our family won a couple of awards, and we want to thank you for helping us achieve that. (more…)

On May 6th, 2008, the Walk Awards banquet was held at Hy-Vee Corportate Conference Center. One of my favorite things about that building is the bricks right outside the main doors. I’ve always liked that “hard” recognition of Hy-Vee’s national sponsorship of JDRF.  Hy-Vee has been an awesome sponsor and partner for our chapter, they raise about a million dollars a year for JDRF, and that’s just awesome. (more…)

Walk day this year was a lot better than last year, simply because there hadn’t been a blizzard, and everyone on our team could make it! 

 And as you can see, a whole lot of other people did, too!  We estimated that we had over 8,000 people at the walk this year!  We had more inflatables, more exhbitors, more food from the vendors, It was a great day!  There were hundreds of people still there when we had to shut things down for the day. 

Our team fundraising goal was $10,000.  With the help of a few new people on our team, we were able to exceed that.  We got Amber’s YMCA after school teachers on our team, and they raised over a thousand.  One of my friends that I met through JDRF joined our team this year, and she raised almost two thousand.  Plus we’ve had more of our friends raise even just a hundred dollars.  My fundraising was even more than last year, and Thrivent Financial is going to do another team matching gift of $3,000!  Thanks, Jeff Olson!

The Walk Awards banquet is May 6th, we’ll see how well we stack up with all the other walk teams.  Until then, thanks to all of Amber’s Angels! 

The JDRF Walk to Cure 2008 will be held on March 1st, and Amber’s Awesome Angels are going to be there!  We’d like you to be there, too!  Walk day will be pretty much like last year, from 8 to 11:30, with food and drink in Capital Square and play stuff in the Convention Complex.  You can join our team by clicking on Join This Team on  Amber’s walk page! 

The theme is this year is High School Musical, with the slogan, “We’re all in this together!”  It’s one of the lines from those two movies that has really stuck with us.  We are all in this together, helping each other out when we need advice or when we just need someone to complain to.  We have to live with the daily management of this disease, and we understand the frustrations of trying to figure it out.  We are a big family, and that’s the best thing about the walk, it’s more than 7,000 brothers and sisters, all in the same family for just a few hours of one day. (more…)

At the Children with Diabetes conference in Orlando this summer (yes, I still need to post about that), one of the things we realized is that there is a lot we don’t know about how to fully use Amber’s pump.  Everything from understanding the different types of boluses to insulin duration to basal rate testing.  So when we found out CWD was going to have a regional conference in Minneapolis, we jumped at the opportunity!  Not only could we go to a CWD event, which are just awesome and inspiring, but we could drive there and not have to buy airline tickets.  Plus my sister, Patty, lives in Minneapolis, so we thought we’d get a chance to see them as well.  We did a little bit, but not nearly as much as we’d have liked. (more…)