Day 5: It's Buddy Walk Time!

Tis the season for Buddy Walks, cropping up in local Down syndrome associations around the country. The annual Buddy Walk, a title coined by the National Down Syndrome Society (NDSS), is generally the largest fundraiser of the year for these organizations, helping them to provide important programs and support for local people with Down syndrome and their families.

We have been so fortunate to have had the Down Syndrome Association of Northern Virginia these last 5 years. It’s an amazing group of parents, children and self-advocates, all working hard to make our community better for people with Ds. The DSANV is run by volunteers, relying on outside donations to make it all happen.

See that little thermometer to the right of this post? That’s where our team’s Buddy Walk fundraising is right now – we’re less than 2 weeks away (October 15th) and have hit our goal and will hopefully have a sweet little milestone marker with our team’s name on it - Sweet Pea United - waiting for us at the Walk.  Since so many of you reading this today are already involved in your own Buddy Walk fundraising, I’ll appeal to those of you reading this who are not part of the Down syndrome community – please donate to help DSANV to hit its larger goal and beyond! I promise you, it will not go to waste. We have benefited in so many ways from the support of this organization, and I have seen how so many others have as well. Every time a tiny new baby is born with an extra chromosome in our area, DSANV is ready to welcome that baby to the world, to congratulate the parents and welcome them to the fold, to provide information and contacts that let them know it’ll be all right…

(The DSANV Parent-to-Parent program is something that’s near and dear to me. I will write more about that in a future post.)

In the meantime, back to the Buddy Walk, I hope those of you who are local and not already participating will join our team! It will be a very fun day – there are activities for all ages (okay, well, mostly for kids…), including music, Rachel Coleman from Signing Time (we are in the serious minority here, as Sammi will probably be about the only kid there who doesn’t know who she is), a petting zoo, face-painting, bouncy castles, a retail tent, an Imagine the PossAbilities tent – a great display! – food vendors, costumed characters, and lots of other things. There should be approximately 2,000 people there, as well!

**(Oh, just a quick note about our ignorance of Signing Time – when Samantha was a baby, we kept hearing about how wonderful Signing Time was. Finally, my mother came over one day and brought one of the DVDs that she’d bought. We watched it, but were completely underwhelmed. There was no music, no singing, just some slow-moving lessons on some basic signs for some basic words. Samantha was bored, I was bored, and I just couldn’t see what everyone saw in it so we dismissed the concept. Shortly afterwards, Sammi’s verbal language started taking off, and we had never actually introduced more than a few signs to her. It turns out that we had actually gotten just about the only episode of Signing Time that didn’t have the songs! And I know Samantha would have loved it. Oh well… Btw, Mom, I’m not blaming you…LOL)

Hope to see you on the 15th!