Relay For Life

Our county's annual Relay for Life was yesterday. This is something our family likes to participate in together. We always do it to remember my brother, who lost a short, hard battle with melanoma in 2005. This year, cancer has reared it's ugly face again in our family as my mom is battling stage 4 colon cancer.

The theme for this year was "Birthdays". When you are fighting for your life, every additional birthday is a blessing and a gift. The survivors lap always puts things in perspective for me! I can remember when Andrew was 8 and his health was spinning out of control. We were searching for answers and things continued to change with him. At that point, we weren't sure there would be a 9th birthday for him. So I truly understand why Birthdays was the perfect theme for this year's Relay.

We were on the Taekwondo Relay team this year, so we did an Asian Birthdays theme. There's an Asian tradition that if you eat cake with 100 friends on your birthday, you'll have good luck for the year. So, we sold cake and threw in a Chinese mint and a fortune cookie with it. We had all sorts of cute decorations, too! Except the cute little hats bled on the white shirts when it rained off and on throughout the day.

Setting up tents

You can see some of our decorations...and the black and red lanterns survived the rain and still glowed at night!

This was another fundraiser we did...for $2 people could duke it out. It always drew a crowd. 

Someone was trying to take a pic of Andrew and I, but the young cute one is missing. I'm usually the one taking pics so what the heck, for once, here's me.

Our team raised over $3000 this year through our soy candles and candy bar sales in the spring, and our coffee, hot chocolate, cake, and boxing at the Relay. Way to go Stangle's Taekwondo! Already looking forward to next year!