Help Fill a Dream is a Vancouver Island organization that fills the dreams of children with life-threatening conditions, and also provides financial assistance to families with sick children. They have granted over 1,900 wishes to Island kids!! They are a fantastic group of hardworking, big-hearted people, who have helped me and my family enormously over the past few years. They are certainly a can-do organization. Recently, they had their big ‘Rink of Dreams’ fundraiser, which is a 24 hour hockey marathon! A really nice girl about my age named Rachael and I were asked to be honorary captains, to drop ceremonial puck together- how cool is that? There was a rehearsal a while ago, where I got to meet everyone, and see how things were going to go and all, and yesterday was the big finale of the fundraiser. Amazingly, a company called MacQuarie Group matched the donations, and HFAD was presented with a check for $80,000 (with hopefully another $20,000 en route, bringing the final total to $100,000!). I have no doubt this will quickly be turned into a whole lot of wishes.
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| Check presentation ceremony :D. |
I had no idea wheelchairs could go on the ice, but apparently it is no problem. Before I was sick, I was a pretty poor ice skater, but could manage by holding on to two people and constantly falling or nearly doing the splits. Lets leave it by saying that I lacked control, and had to run into things to stop. I’ve never played real Canadian ‘ice’ hockey, but loved field hockey at my old school, and what I lacked in skill I made up for in enthusiasm.
The whole thing was just a whole lot of fun, and exciting. I didn’t stay very long, because I was feeling so poorly, but enjoyed watching all the costumed characters unfolding the ginormous flag for the singing of ‘O Canada’. I think the people were in costumes partly because the most popular wish request is a trip to Disney Land :D. Very cute.
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| Darth Vader, alongside Princess Leia, Snow White and Captain Jack Sparrow. |