Happy Birthday Grandpa & Kate and Thank YOU!

What a celebration Saturday night! About 200 friends and family members joined us for an evening of food, laughter, tears and even a little education, as we celebrated the 70th birthday of my father, Lansing J Roy, and the 1st birthday of our baby girl, Katherine Elizabeth. It was a very emotional night for us and we felt so much love and support. From the 30 or so children dancing and eating cake to the lifetime friends of our families, we enjoyed seeing so many friendly faces. In lieu of gifts, we asked guests to make a charitable contribution to the Myotonic Dystrophy Foundation, with 100% of this being earmarked for research. We were completely blown away when our final tally was done....we raised over $13,000 for research! THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF OUR HEARTS! We are hopeful that by the time our Katiebug reaches her 18th birthday, that great research advancements will prevail and that she will have every chance at a promising, strong future!

Our Myotonic Dystrophy specialist, Dr. Tetsuo Ashizawa, of the University of Florida (Shands) in Gainesville, attended and served as our guest speaker, educating our guests about Myotonic Dystrophy and research progress. We were thrilled that he, his wife and precious daughter were able to join us for the party. A special thank you to Theo Kouremetis, our friend and chef, who whipped up a fabulous spread of appetizers and gourmet dinner. Delicious! Special thanks also goes to Haley Alvarado for photographing the event and Jeff Green for recording the program. We would also like to thank our friends and family members who helped up set up, cover the children's room, borrow decorations, create a well-wishes book, run for ice, serve drinks and clean up! We couldn't have done it without you.

For those of you that know me, I am teacher by trade, and many of my teacher friends were in attendance. If you are interested in reading a blog from the "teacher" perspective of the event, check out dayle timmons' blog. She was and still is my teaching mentor and truly has a way with words!

Many of you had other obligations and missed the party. We will be posting a recording of the program on this site as soon as it becomes available. If you are interested in reading the poem "Holland" (that I tearfully read during the program) we will have a link on here as well.

We aren't able to announce the details about our future annual fundraising event just yet, but stay tuned....