June 26, 2009

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, which is going to be my excuse for not posting for awhile. In chronoligical order, our first big event was moving out of our house. We were sad to sell it and move out, but it was becoming more apparent as Grace gets bigger and as she uses her power wheelchair and Standing Dani more that we needed to move into a regular ranch-style home. The only negative of the whole deal is that we can't move into our new house until late July, so for now we're stuck in limbo living with my parents in LeMars. It hasn't actually been too bad, and for Grace it's been like an extended five weeks vacation at Grandpa and Grandma's.

Last week we spent four days in Cincinnati at the FSMA national conference, and for so many reasons it was a tremendous trip. Grace got to see and play with a lot of kids like her in wheelchairs--which she never gets to see at her school. We think that's a great benefit for her. For us it was great to network with families, go to the workshops, meet new people, and learn a lot more about some of the things we can do for Grace. It's always tough to think about what the future might hold for Grace, but we usually fight off our periodic bouts of worry and sadness with optimism for what the future holds.

We're thinking about a number of things we might start doing for Grace in terms of nutrition, medicine, equipment, therapy, and I think I'll touch on those in the next few weeks.

Finally, RAGBRAI and our annual Race 4 Grace fundraiser is less than a month away. We've already started mailing and emailing the donation form for this year, and if you want one, you can download it on the home page of the website. Basically you have two ways to participate in Race 4 Grace--ride with our team in RAGBRAI or send in a donation--we appreciate any kind of participation! More to come.

June 5, 2009

Busy times at our house. We're packing and getting ready to move next week--the result of selling our home a lot quicker than we anticipated. Grace seems to have accummulated an unbelievable amount of dolls of all types, and her mom has avoided packing her room to this point.

We're doing some preliminary work for the Race 4 Grace 2009 campaign. We're going to put together a sheet to email and handout as a way of collecting donations. Everything we raise this year we're going to give to the Iowa chapter of FSMA. Our plan this year is to send a Race 4 Grace T-shirt to anyone who donates $25 or more. Anyone who's seen the T-shirts knows they're pretyt sweet. We're also in midst of recruiting riders for the RAGBRAI portion of Race 4 Grace--I'm excited that we have some newbies this year.