JDRF Walk

After much anticipation, we finally got to walk in the JDRF Walk for the Cure 5K in Schaumburg!  We signed up for this race back in March, if I remember correctly.  So, we've been excited about this day for a long time!  Hopefully it'll be the first walk of many in our future.

The weather forecast for the day wasn't only awful, it was scary!  They were calling for pouring rains, thunderstorms, and 50 mph winds.  Not really the forecast you want when you're walking outside for 2 hours or more.  The day before we just as yucky - lots of rain and clouds.  The temps, however, were actually quite nice.  It was in the mid-60s all weekend.  It was great!  We all said some prayers that somehow there would be a break in the weather during our walk, but we brought our raincoats, umbrellas, and bought some ponchos just in case.  When we parked our cars, the clouds were everywhere, but not a drop of rain to be seen.  We were getting excited to walk over to the park, especially after seeing how many people were there!

Em, Jeff, and the girls were ready to go too!!

There were tons of people walking over to the park from the parking lot with us and tons already there.  Since this was our first year, we didn't know quite what to expect, but the atmosphere was really powerful and exciting!  There was a group of drummers that were pounding away as we entered the park.

As we got closer, we saw all the tents up.  We actually saw them putting them up the day before the walk.  It was exciting to see how many went up.  Each tent had a team or a vendor in it. 

Some of our donations came in the form of cash, so we took our envelope up to the registration pavilion and got checked in.  We made our goal of $500 and actually made $525!  Not bad for our first year!  Because Noah raised over $100 himself, he got a free tshirt.  He was so excited!

The biggest tent there was filled with healthy, low-carb snacks.  And, all of it was FREE!  They had fresh fruit, granola bars of every shape and size, water bottles, juice, pop, etc..  We loaded up!

There was a stage with a DJ and he was playing lots of great music that the kids loved dancing to.  Kendalyn did her "bootie shake" for us.  It was hilarious!

Here we are!  We were the "Diabetic Sock Ninjas"!  I made our shirts, so they weren't as professional as some of the other teams, but when we were walking, a volunteer laughed and said, "I love your shirts!".  Made us all pretty happy to hear!

The walk began at 9:30 and we all started walking.  Here we are starting our very first 5K!

I will admit I was worried about how crowded it was going to be, because honestly, there were thousands of people as you'll see from the picture below this one, but we had plenty of room to walk and move around.  It wasn't too hard to stay together as a team (except that I have very short legs and my husband has very long legs!).  Look at our awesome team!

You can see in the background of this picture how many people there were.  There were just as many in front of us too!  Just tons and tons of people, all there to support these kids and their fight to end Type 1 Diabetes!

The kids got pretty tired along the way and Livie tried to grab a ride any time she could.  Kendalyn wanted to push her in her stroller.  So cute!

There were check points along the way, with bathrooms and more snacks.  This bagpipe group greeted us at the halfway point.

We took that opportunity to have a few more snacks.  Noah was the only one that opted out of eating any snacks while we were there and it was all for him in the first place!  Oh well, we enjoyed the bananas and plums without him. ;-)

These were the clouds that threatened our walk.  Did I mention that even though they hung around us the entire way, there wasn't a single raindrop the entire time we were out there?  The wind even died right down after the race started.  The rain started literally 2 min after we got back to the van to leave.  It was such an answer to prayer!  We serve an awesome God!

Towards the middle/end of the walk, Noah and Madie were getting tired.  Livie had gotten free stroller and shoulder rides, but Noah and Madie kept trekking away.  They found some walking sticks to help them continue on.

Here is our amazing group at the finish line!!  So thankful and glad that my sister and Jeff and the girls were willing to come out and support us!  It was a joy to have them there.  We laughed and chatted the entire time and it was so much fun.  We had the best weekend with them!  I have a lot more pictures of some of the other things we did during our weekend, but I knew that getting up the walk pictures was the first priority.  Hopefully I'll get to the rest tomorrow. 

We left the walk and headed back to the hotel to pack up and check out, then went to lunch with our team.  We decided to hit Ikea one more time before we went our seperate ways (we went the day before for the 1st time too!).  When we left Ikea, it was pouring.  And, not just pouring, I mean thunderstorms, craziness, and tornado warnings!  The sirens were going off and it became a bit of a scary situation.  We said our quick goodbyes and they headed home, while we headed over to Jill's to hide in her basement until the storm passed.  You'll see in the picture above, that all the busyness of the day caught up with Noah and Livie when we finally started driving home around 4pm.  They were out and dead asleep within minutes of leaving Arlington Heights.  Guess all that fun wore them out. :-)  It was a fabulous weekend and a great walk.  So thankful that we were able to be a small part of raising money to find a cure.