So, yeah. I’m asking for money. Except that we won’t actually ever see or touch any of it. It all just goes directly to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, a private organization supporting research and education dedicated to helping those suffering from Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis to lead healthier, fuller lives.

Our family will be participating in a benefit walk on June 7 and we are looking forward to meeting some people in person who are also living with this disease. And hoping to raise a little extra money for the foundation. It has already proven to be an excellent source of information and encouragement and we are not even actually members yet.  Oh, and since I haven’t really written that much about it here, you can read all my wishy-washy personal journey type posts over at my personal blog.  The top one looks a lot like this one, but the rest aren’t.

So anyway…if you got online today just wondering what tax deductible donations you could make to foundations you likely hadn’t heard of before at the request of someone you have never met, have I got the thing for you! Or you could just click over to see the picture of my daughter on a horse. You would not believe how excited she was to get to ride that horse. Before that, her yearly highlight was always the members’ appreciation night at the zoo when the pony rides are free.

If interested, all you have to do is click on the drop down menu at the top of the fund raising page and click on my name (it is the only one there right now since my children are all under 13). It will give you the instructions from there. And if you like donating other people’s money to foundations you have never heard of at the recommendation of strangers on the internet, they even have the paperwork for matching contributions from your employer. Thanks to my mom’s employer, we already reached our first goal. Maybe we set our sights too low.

Thank you everyone for your continued prayers and support. We really appreciate them!

Update: More tests. An upper GI where she gets to do a barium swallow and have her small intestine X-rayed along with a DEXA (bone density scan) and another blood draw to determine whether or not she has an enzyme to process one of the medications the doctor is looking at prescribing that is effective with smaller children. The original treatment plan may be altered if this will work for her. The doctor is taking a closer look to rule out the possibility of Crohn’s Disease, a related but much worse disease. For those of you who missed it, I did discuss at more length what this all means on my other blog.

Well, I had intended on posting yesterday. I did not slink away into a cyber-hermitage after receiving my daughter’s diagnosis and actually had a post planned for last night. But not being able to log in to my account put a bit of a damper on my ability to post. For those who have not seen it and are curious, we do have a tentative diagnosis of ulcerative colitis.

I had planned on switching gears today and leaving behind our whaling unit to begin a bit of a study of the diagnosis, whatever it ended up being, to begin to help my daughter learn about the disease and begin to learn to manage it.

We got as far as the definition of “chronic” and it began to dawn on her that this was not going to just go away. That was about all she was emotionally able to handle today, so I read to her a little about how most people are healthy more often than they are sick and that a lot of the time she will not even have to think about the disease. And then we stopped for today.

This study isn’t going to be able to take place like other studies. It will be “here a little, there a little” as she works through her own anxiety of what the future holds.

And now hopefully I really will resume normal posting, barring the technical difficulties which seem to have overtaken this blog over the last couple of days.