5.16.06: our walk for the wee ones

(As some of you know, my Mac's hard drive decided to quit on me a few weeks ago. I took it as a good reason to justify upgrading to the latest and greatest of the Mac desktops and I'm now finally back up and running.)

On April 29th, the small Davis Groundhogs Team (consisting of Mary, Jenni, Mason and I) headed to the State Capitol Bldg in Sacramento to participate in the March of Dimes WalkAmerica.

WalkAmerica began in 1970 and is the largest fundraiser for the March of Dimes in an effort to fund research and build awareness to prevent premature births and birth defects, as well as give those babies who are born early and sick a better chance to survive and thrive.

As soon as we arrived to the starting point of the walk, we just so happened to run into the small group of Sutter's Special Care Nursery team. Once we convinced Mason that they weren't there to take him back to the NICU, he stopped crying and we were able to proceed. It was great to see them and join them for the entire 10K walk ... and even lunch afterward.

Because of our late commitment to participate in the walk, we barely allowed ourselves any time for raising funds. We still set our sights high with a team goal of $1000 despite having only two days to reach it. Much to our surprise, we surpassed our goal! Our emailathon rallied up $1600 between online and offline donations. Woo hoo!

Thanks so much to our very generous friends and families for supporting us and a very worthy cause!

Thanks also to Jenni for creating a onesie for Mason that read "25 weeker" and shared both his birth weight and current weight.

The walk itself was great. The weather was nice and comfortable for the entire walk -- reasonably cool in the start, warming up a little by the end. Mason slept for about 75% of the two hour walk. The toughest part about the day was not having Avery with us. We were hoping to bring him along but he had recently recovered from a 2-day stomach bug which then became a bacterial infection. This meant frequent diaper changes and a very nasty diaper rash. (As if Avery hasn't been through enough recently!)

This was our first WalkAmerica event, but we intend to make it an annual experience. Next year our Davis Groundhogs team will include Avery and maybe we'll even encourage a few others to come out and walk with us.