“Sawyer was diagnosed on Labor Day weekend of 2018.  We spent our first few months creating our new normal. While we went to Endo appts we were told about the camps and the JDRF Walk. We knew we wanted to help not just Sawyer but anyone with type 1 diabetes so we decided to do the walk.

Our first walk was so great! Sawyer felt like a celebrity with all the fun stuff to do all geared towards him.  The experience created an excitement to bring us back again this year.

For Sawyers 7th Birthday he got a shirt from his cousins that had a picture of a pickle that read, “I’m kind of a big Dill.” That is what created our team name and theme as he loved it so much.

As we began to raise money for the walk we tried to come up with fun ways to keep it interesting. We mainly raised money by putting the link on our social media pages. We kept our social media page alive by adding our #100daysofwalking challenge. For 100 days I posted a pic of Sawyer on a walk with friends and family. It was very relatable to type 1 andI  would add the link in every once and a while. Before we knew it we had almost reached our goal.

One way we raised money this year was at our annual Booya. For the last 8 years our family and the family we share backyards with make a Booya. Our families spent a day cutting the vegetables and preparing the Booya and then it cooked in a large pot over night. On Sunday we invited many people over to help us eat 30 gallons of Booya and watch football outside! Sawyer and his brothers set up a stand at the Booya party and sold some bracelets with his team motto on them.  This was a huge hit and part of the success to our money raised this year for the walk.

We are so happy to share in the community of the walk and what it means for all these kids! We hope to create an amazing experience again with JDRF.

Now we are a year and a half into diagnosis and I will be honest I never thought I would get to this point of normal. It’s a new normal, but it’s nice. At first, we felt so much uncertainty and fear about the future. We had to start one minute at a time. Literally minute by minute and then hour by hour.  When we left the hospital we were given a great deal of information but I still felt like it was just enough for Sawyer to survive and not thrive. So I started to do my own research. After lots of books and reading, podcasts and the biggest one of all – trust – we have come to a place we can truly say with all our hearts that sawyer is thriving and living his best life with a very supportive community of people to get us to where we are today.”

Written by Tara Weber, mom of Sawyer