Musical Theatre Mom: March for Babies

Sunday, May 4, 2014

March for Babies

Today was the March of Dimes Walk for Babies in Kansas City. We had such a wonderful day. Dillon, Andrew and I drove to KC yesterday and met our KC family for dinner and stayed at their house. These are the people who kind of adopted me when Dillon was in the NICU and shuttled me to and from the hospital every day for a month. They love us, we love them, and it's always a love fest when we get together.

Dillon had us up bright and early so we made our way to the Power & Light district to register for the walk with time to spare. I had signed up for the race weeks ago, but you turn in your money and get your t-shirt at registration. This was my first March of Dimes walk so I had set a modest fundraising goal of $250. I donated $50 of my own money and emailed a handful of people to ask if they'd be interested in helping out as well. They did, and then a friend encouraged me to post the link to Facebook. Cut to: we raised $1100!!! They make a big deal out of that kind of money at the March of Dimes. I checked in, they looked at my totals and they rang a cow bell and all the volunteers screamed and cheered and someone came over to thank me (us) profusely for the donations and gave us VIP tickets to a breakfast and when I asked if I could buy extra t-shirts for Dillon and Andrew, they just gave them to me. Good job, Team Dillon! You all are amazing and your generosity never ends. I was very proud of all of us today.

The walk was huge. I didn't know what to expect. I heard someone say that last year they had 10,000 walkers and given the incredible weather this morning, I would guess it was the same. I was hoping I'd run into some familiar NICU nurses but there were just too many people. There were lots of booths set up with games for kids, prizes, food, water - all free. There was also a group from the Ren Fest which is not my cup of tea when outside an actual Ren Fest but whatever. And lots of characters from Star Wars. And then the random characters from restaurants. Andrew was afraid of those - particularly the huge armadillo from Texas Roadhouse. Nothing is worse than the pig from Famous Dave's but I digress...

Everyone started the walk together while one of the local radio stations played our family-favorite song, Happy. I cried.

And then we walked across Baby Boulevard and I cried again.

And then this happened and I cried again. Peas in a pod, these two.

We had the choice of a one mile walk or three and we chose the three mile. Andrew did great! We chatted and played I-Spy (Kansas City Style) while we walked. Dillon slept for 3/4 of the walk and didn't wake up until we got back to the van. Andrew kept thinking it was a race and wondered when we were going to run. It was more like a three mile stroll with that many people on a city sidewalk.