Race for the Cure 2012!!  This has become a big deal family tradition for us.  We started doing it nine years ago in Phoenix.  I think our first Race for the Cure was the same weekend that my family met J for the first time.  We’ve missed a few years here and there since then, but the past four years have found us “racing” through downtown Portland.

We’ve assembled a bit of a consistent crew over the years, usually with Carrie and Leah, often with Glenn and Beth, and this year Grandma T joined us too.  I look forward to creating the memory for the kiddos.  It’s always a fun, powerful, humorous, emotional, overwhelming morning – and then we all get brunch and continue on with our day.  It serves as an annual reminder to be thankful for our health and each other (not to mention my beautiful MOTHER), and also a reminder now to dwell on illness but to look to life and the future.  And, as Carrie reminded us, brunch.