March For Babies

This weekend we did the March of Dimes walk. My husbands work normally has about 1000 employees participate in the walk and there was about 5000 people in total that walked. This year he decided to walk and brought me in on the walking also. Between the two of us we raised about $500 for the walk. It was great to do something for such a great cause.

It is also a very humbling experience as you see so many families walking because they had their own personal experiences with children born early or with health issues. I saw one family with a wagon train, 3 toddlers each in a wagon and each wagon was labeled with a sign of born at 1 lb 2 oz, 1 lb 6 oz, 2 lbs…. it was great to see all three of them grown and healthy and beating the odds. Many groups walking with shirts about a child, sometimes you don’t know if they made it or not but still so wonderful to see them out there. I had never done the March of Dimes before but being a mom just makes me want to support something so great and now I want to do it every year.

We got up early Sunday morning and drove to Downtown Cincinnati where the walk began. We took the kids with us and made it a family event. We had beautiful weather this weekend. This is Ohio and in April it can be 80 or we could have snow, you just never know. This weekend we hit 80 and it was wonderful. It was probably in the 70’s when we walked early in the morning. It was a 6 mile walk and here are some of the highlights of our walk.

We started at the river in downtown Cincinnati. We took our large bike trailer/stroller because Luke is my lazy child and 6 miles is way too much walking for a 6 year old. We walked along the river and went around The Great American Ball Park, home to the Cincinnati Reds. Then we went around the Paul Brown stadium home to the Cincinnati Bangles. Here is a picture of the football stadium.

We walked down to the bridge shown on the other side of the football stadium (seen in the picture). We then crossed the Ohio river into Kentucky where we then walked back along the river to Newport.

I took a picture of the Reds stadium from the Kentucky side. This is zoomed in from the other side of the Ohio river.

We then crossed not this bridge but the next one down in the picture back into Ohio.

A total walk of 6 miles that was pretty tough when Thomas would not stay in the stroller and wanted to be carried 90% of the walk. Poor Eric did a lot of this for most of the walk.

We crossed the finish line where they had music and activities for the kids. Eric took Luke down along the river front to check things out. Thomas and I did some coloring at one of the kid activity tables.

Finally I took this last picture as I read the different posters about the different families with some of the stories of survival and of memories of the little ones that were lost. Those were the hard ones to read about. All I can say is how thankful and blessed I was to have two beautiful and healthy baby boys.

Have you ever done a charitable walk like this?