IVHS Dog Walk 2009

June 2, 2009 by Jamie

On Saturday we participated in the annual Inland Valley Humane Society Dog Walk at Bonelli Park. Even though we had attended this event before it had been two years since the last time. Our good friend Sarah is a volunteer for IVHS and actively participates in this event every year. More recently since her daughter Natasha was born she has been celebrating Natasha’s birthday at the Dog Walk since they are both in May. Sarah has set up a team for Natasha for the past three years and has asked people to donate to Team Natasha in lieu of gifts. This has been very successful for fundraising, Natasha’s team is usually one of the highest fund raiser’s for the event. Last year, Natasha’s team was in the lead to be the top fundraising team, however, another team came in at the last minute and took victory over Natasha. If you know Sarah you know that she couldn’t let that happen two years in a row so she started fundraising very early this year and her efforts paid off because Natasha not only won top fund raising team but also won top fund raising youth. Because this event was also a celebration of Natasha’s third birthday Sarah went all out with the party favors. She made white chocolate paws with Oreo cookies inside and also cupcakes with tons of frosting and little white chocolate dog bones on top.

The event begins with a pancake breakfast which I think is one of the best things about attending. The next best thing are the hundreds of different dogs you get to see at the event and how crazy some of their owners dress them up. Sarah brings two of her dogs to the walk every year, Aisha the German Shepard and The Wizard, the chocolate lab. This year’s theme was Hollywood and Sarah came prepared with gold stars for each of us to wear, black shirts were mandatory. Going along with the Hollywood theme I was called upon to be Natasha’s personal paparazzi so Sarah would have plethora of photos to choose from for a scrapbook. As you can see in the photo below Natasha gave me the same look Jessica Alba gives to a TMZ photographer. I think I’ve found my calling. The walk started at 9:30am and winds through Bonelli, next to Puddingstone Lake and mile 3 ends somewhere near Raging Waters where the turn around point is. Our group went about 2 miles out before we decided to turn around and head back to eat cupcakes. We sang happy birthday to Natasha and then she was called to the stage to get her awards and prizes. This is a fun event to attend and a great cause to get behind, even though we were exhausted at the end of the day it was worth it.

DISCLAIMER: I realize there are a lot of pictures of kids in this blog, some may even call them cute. This amount of kid pictures is highly unusual for my blogs so don’t get used to it.