CHD Awareness Week in review

I realize that CHD awareness week was over a month ago and I am quite behind, but I still wanted to post about what we did to bring awareness to the number one birth related defect. The following post is the video that I made for the presentations---I am grateful for another heart mom who let me 'copy' her video so I could include Gracie in it.

I was able to set up some presentations with some local organizations. My first presentation was for the Resident Assistants (RA) at BYU (the local university). I think this was by far my favorite presentation, perhaps because I felt that it brought the awareness to the ones who will be most affect by CHD's in the near future. I loved how receptive they were and how many of the RAs jumped on the opportunity to do a service project for the kids at Primary Children's hospital as opposed to 'traditional' Valentine Day activities.

My other two presentations were for school aged groups. One group was about 60 3rd graders. It was fun to have some of them wear oxygen and carry around a tank and try to do things that some heart kids have to do. I loved hearing how hard the experience was for them and how it made not only those who were wearing the oxygen stop and think, but all of the students seemed to get a sense of how hard it can be physically for our heart kiddos.

My last presentation was to a bunch of young men and young women from my church between the ages of 12-18. I don't know why, but that presentation seemed to stress awareness to how they can help heart kiddos in the future. I kept telling them that maybe one of them would become cardiologists or cardiothoracic surgeons--wouldn't that just be amazing! At the end of the presentation, this group also had the chance to help me with my service project that I have been working on for the last month.

Gracie spent more of her first year of life at Primary Children's hospital then she did at home. We were blessed by many donations from others and I wanted, not only to pay it forward, but also to be able to give heart kiddos something fun to do while they are stuck in bed and not have much energy for anything else. I am not very crafty, but wanted to make something, so I finally settled on making finger puppets.

My finger puppets are by far not perfect and I kind of feel silly taking them up to the hospital since they look kinda "ghettoish". But I figure, the kids aren't going to judge and hopefully they are just going to love to play with them, even if it is only for 10 minutes.

"Super hero puppets"

"Old MacDonald puppets"

"Princess puppets"

As previous post mentioned, a friend and I worked together to sell hair bows for IHH, I am happy to announce it was a great success. Tons of bow were sold and we even had a special donor buy 26 bows to donate to the hospital in Gracie's name!

I am excited to drop both the bows and puppets off to the hospital this Friday when we go up for our fetal echo. I hope that both of these things will bring a smile to the faces of so many sweet heart kiddos and their parents as they go through the trials that come with not having a perfect heart.