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

Then the team and individual awards were presented.  Amber’s Awesome Angels won the top family team!  Our team raised over $21,000!!!  Thanks to all of you who donated or helped us raise money!  We were awarded with a plaque, as well as a Circle Of Excellence pin from LifeScan, who makes the OneTouch meters that we use.  The lady in the green shirt is Kristy Slining, who is our LifeScan rep, who presented us the award.  The lady on the right is Mary Hunter, our JDRF Executive Director.

The Pioneer team won a platinum award, with over $34,000 raised! 

Each of us also received a Golden Sneaker award, for having raised over $1,000!  I had Austin talked into going up on stage to announce his total himself.  Last year, Kim went with him, but he was too shy to actually speak into the mic.  Well, he got restless this year (go figure) and went to a back corner to play a little basketball, so he missed his turn.  Darn it!

But he got another opportunity to go up on stage, for the very last award of the evening.  The final presentation was for the Volunteer of the Year award.  It recognizes the person who goes above and beyond for JDRF, and who participates in all JDRF’s activities.  When they started reading a description of who was being honored with this award, it began sounding very familiar. 

They honored our whole family with the award! How cool is that?

Here’s all the awards be brought home from the evening!

 

 

 

 

 

 

So to wrap it up, there’s just one thing to say to all of you:

Anyway, because of severe weather, our usual emcee, Ed Wilson, was unavailable, so Andy Fales stepped in, and did a great job.  It’s too bad that we didn’t have more lead time, because it would have been fun to do a spoof of “What’s Bugging Andy” on the topic of diabetes.  I think he was a little nervous, but he did an outstanding job, and Kim thinks that JDRF should get him as emcee more often.  I’d be ok with that.

One of the first things they did was announce the total raised for the walk.  $1.6 million is awesome, but it was less than our goal of $1.8 million.  Oh well, we’re that much closer to finding a cure, and we just have to try harder next year.  Mary Hunter, our Executive Director, presented an award to Dr Stevenson, this year’s corporate chair, and noted that Paul Schickler of Pioneer would be the corporate chair for next year!  Looking forward to that, it’s going to make for some good challenges for us at Pioneer! 

At our table was Jeff Olson, from Thrivent Financial, who sponsored our team again this year, Mary Ann Clark from Pioneer, and her mother, Janis Foote from Pioneer (who is our “Walk mentor”, as she got us to our first walk in 2005), and Scott and Jasny Brentano.  Jasny is the same age as Amber, and they are good friends.  Jasny’s mom, Jennifer, was on staff at JDRF. 

See the next post for the awards we won that night!

 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 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.

Our organized fundraising for this year started last fall, when we sold game programs at Iowa State footballs games.  We worked at two different games, and with the help of a few friends we managed to raise about $550! 

We also have our can and bottle redemption fundraiser going on year round as well, and we make hundreds annually from that.  Our annual Christmas/New Years neighborhood can drive was this weekend, we had a good sized donation!  Our neighbors are awesome with helping support us!

 In July we had our yearly garage sale, where we put all the profits to our walk team. 

Kim also hosted a Pampered Chef party in November, and she donated all of her host proceeds to our walk team as well. 

 So as of today, 5 January, we currently have over $1100 raised, with more to be deposited!

But we need your help.  Diabetes sucks, and we need to do whatever we can to raise money to find a cure!  Please be part of our family for Walk Day!

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.

The conference started on Friday night and went until Sunday afternoon.  Friday night was basically a social event around the vendor tables, where you get get updates on technology and fill up a bag full of giveaway stuff (pens, notebooks, meters, bags, backpacks, etc.).  The sessions started Saturday morning with a keynote speech.  Amber and Austin get put into age-specific groups, but since Austin is only 5 and for insurance reasons they have to keep the 5-and-unders separate from the 6-9ers, he gets frustrated and doesn’t get much out of the conferences, because it’s basically day care, and they just sit around and play.  So Patty asked if they could take him for the day Saturday, and they wound up having him for a sleepover on Friday night as well.  This made us a little nervous, since he’s never slept away from us before, and he doesn’t sleep well away from home as it is.  But he wound up doing fine.  They were going to a kid’s bike marathon at my nephew’s school in the morning, right after his hockey practice.  Austin liked hockey practice, but he wanted them to shoot more goals.  He didn’t do so well at the bike marathon, he’s not much of a biker to begin with, and this was a long ride, and I warned my sister that he would struggle.  He did.  But he had fun.  In the afternoon my nephew had a birthday party, so Austin got to go along to that.  It was at a bowling alley, and it’s been a while since Austin has bowled on anything except the Wii, but he did fine.  The most interesting thing from the day was that one of the items in the treat bag from the party was a whoopee cushion.  That was a BIG hit with Amber and Austin.  They are both at the age when that kind of humor is the funniest thing, I guess.  Everything became a fake fart.  The whoopee cushion didn’t last the weekend, though.  Austin kept trying to get a bigger and bigger noise from it, and when he put it on the floor and jumped on it with both feet, it just exploded.  You would have thought we grounded him for life or something, the way he cried.  Sheesh.

The conference topics were really good, everything from proper nutrition to understanding advance pumping techniques.  It’s amazing how everything ties together when you’re pumping.  The different types of food are digested at different rates, which can cause you to need to bolus differently, as sometimes you dose a combination bolus to give a longer dose because of a high fat content, the extent of which is managed by the insulin duration that you have set, which also ties into what you need for the basal rate.  It’s like having a balance with about 5 or 6 arms on it of different length that you have to find just the right amount for, and where someone is changing one of the other amounts while you’re working on figuring out another.  Just when you think you have it balanced, something comes along to knock it out of whack. 

One of the cool things about CWD is the ability to connect to the staff and the instructors.  They just hang around like anyone else, meeting everyone and chatting.  That’s really cool.  Like on Sunday morning, we were just sitting at our table eating breakfast, when Dr Peter Chase and his wife come and sit with us.  If you don’t know Dr Chase’s name, you probably know his work, since he’s the author of the Pink Panther books.  He’s also part of one of JDRF’s closed loop/continuous glucose monitor research test.  He’s been a ped endo for decades.  He was the presenter on several sessions over the weekend.  And we had breakfast with him!  We found out his type 1 son is an executive producer for the Animal Planet.  Really nice guy.  CWD is one of the best outreach and support group organizations I’ve ever seen.  We learn so much at these conferences, they are definitely worth going to.