Mitochondrial Disease Awareness Week

In case you haven't been on Facebook, and you don't know it's Mitochondrial Disease Awareness Week, I'm here to tell you that it is! To kick the week off, we took our annual trek into South Boston for the MitoAction Energy 5K. This year, we were Team Weid, and we were as motley as ever. One of these years, we will get ourselves organized and maybe even come up with some team t-shirts. And maybe we'll walk next year, too. But for this year, Team Weid was made up mostly of runners.



The kids chose to watch their dads (Garth and Nate) and their Uncle Mike and Melanie instead of participating in the walk.



The kids lost interest quickly and wanted to go back to the playground. They repeatedly asked, "Are they almost done?"



Garth appeared first, and not just first for Team Weid, but first overall!



He was followed by Nate...



Uncle Mike...



and Melanie.



MitoAction always puts out a fantastic day. There was music, ice cream, sandwiches, and arts and crafts for the kids.



One of Ali's favorite things is to have her face painted.





You can always tell that Ali has had too much when she starts to look like this:



But we couldn't leave without one more stop at the playground.



Overall, it was a great day for an even better cause. Please support all those affected by mitochondrial disease by taking a minute to learn more about it by visiting either www.mitoaction.org or www.umdf.org. I will update again tomorrow, hopefully from home as Ali has a GI appointment after a somewhat difficult GI kind of week.

End of Summer and Back to School!

Okay, I'm going to try my hand at using Blogger again so that I can include more pictures. It's been a busy and FUN summer out here in north central MA. The girls spent a lot of time enjoying their new pool...





And enjoying the beach.









We also celebrated birthdays with a pool party for family...

And a pool party for friends.



We "celebrated" our first sleep study...



And the first day of school.









Overall, Ali is doing well, though school-related fatigue seems to be particularly rough this year. By the time that Ali gets home from school, she is just done. She can't complete tasks that she has previously mastered (like writing her name) and doesn't even want to feed herself. She's going to bed at 7pm and is asleep within 5 minutes of her head hitting the pillow. She has her sleep study follow-up on Thursday with pulmonary, which should be interesting.

Maya is loving 3rd grade. She's at a new school this year and thinks she is all that. It's amazing to me how much she has grown up. In spite of everything (or because of everything), we continue to be so incredibly lucky.

And a HUGE thank you to G-Pa for taking such great birthday party pictures!