Tiffany: Relay for Life 2009!!

Wow what a busy summer it has just been crazy!! Last weekend was the annual Relay for Life, which is a cancer walk to help raise money for cancer research. My Welling family has a team and this is the second year in a row that we have been the team that has raised the most money. We raised well over $9000 to donate to the Relay. The past few years have been pretty hard at the Relay because cancer took the life of my Uncle Mike Lake just two years ago. It was a very sad thing to go through but we are stronger today because of that and his life he led and the exapmple he set for everyone around him!! All that knew him looked up to him and admired him for everything that he did. This years Relay was a bitter sweet one. We honored Mike and his strength to fight off this horrible disease for some time before it took his life. We missed him being there physically but I know his spirit was in attendance that night!! We also honored my Grandpa Welling and Uncle Gary who had fought off cancer as well. The more sweet bit to the night was seeing my aunt Jill in that purple shirt with SURVIVOR written on the back because she definately is a strong survivor. Towards the end of last year she was diagnosed with cancer and not knowing what the future held, it was pretty tough. But after months of chemo treatments and radiation she had successfully fought it off!! There was not a moment during the whole time that I heard her complain or have a bad attitude about it. She is the strongest women I know to have such a great attitude during such a difficult time!! But it has been a huge blessing for her to fight it and see her walk that survivor walk. It brought tears to my eyes and cheeks and the tears poured down my face and we stood and clapped for her as she and other cancer survivors walked the first lap of the night!! It was a great experience to see her with hair on her head and a huge smile on her face as she waved up to our family in the stands!!

Then it was off to the ball fields for the homerun for a cure all night softball tourney. It was super fun for the first few hours until our energy wore out!! Our first game was at 8:15, then 11:15 then 1:45 and then 3:00 (yes AM!!). AS much as I wanted to win that last game I was so ready to be done... or so I thought :) I ended up staying the whole night into the morning umping games. It wasn't the funnest time of my life and I can only think of a few other things that I've done that were worse but I ended up leaving the ball fields at about 10:30 saturday morning. I was one tired, grumpy girl. But we had a fun time playing and we won two games and lost two so we have improved every year!! Every other inning in the games had fun things to do and one was a kickball inning. Our team rocked!! It was kind of sad that we were in a softball tourney and played better kickball than softball but we all had fun and had limited injuries (just a few stiffa nd sore people the next day... ok probably the whole team) so it was a success!!