Cloth Diaper Raffle to Benefit the Leukemia Lymphoma Society

This past year was a year of change for me. My dad was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma in the Fall.  He wasn’t feeling well and had tremendous pain in his back and ribs. He went to the doctor and they kept him for observation and testing.  They made the determination that he had damage to some of his vertebrae and pitting in his rib bones from Multiple Myeloma. The white blood cells that mature in the bone had become cancerous and had destroyed the bone in those areas.  Thankfully my dad was able to get treatment at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, UT by undergoing a tandem stem cell transplant. 

As of September he is in complete remission.  The cancer will never go away, however, and there is a high chance that his cancer will reoccur.  My dad is the sole breadwinner for my family and he had to be on disability while going through treatment.  The Leukemia Lymphoma Society gave my parents a grant to help pay for my father’s medications and treatments. 

This past year I have been running marathons and half marathons with my husband.  I don’t enjoy running all the time but I decided that if I was going to continue running I needed some more motivation.  That’s when I found out about the Leukemia Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training.   I help them raise money to find a cure for blood cancers and I get to run with a group of people that also want to run and train for a half marathon. 

So where do cloth diapers fit into this you might ask?  The whole reason I started running was because my husband wants us to be healthier.  We have decided to expand our little family this next year and we want to be as healthy as possible. We have always been active outdoors, hiking, biking, and walking, why not running?  Since I am a planner I wanted to start buying things we would need for a baby.  I started off buying baby clothes but quickly realized there was only so much gender neutral clothing I could buy. I really wanted to purchase diapers because people always talk about how many diapers it takes to diaper a baby and how expensive disposable diapers are. But I didn’t want to have a ton of diaper packages lying around our one bedroom apartment. 

One day I was looking at a blogger’s facebook page and she wrote about gDiapers and how cute they were. I decided to take a look and I quickly became obsessed with the idea and purchased one of their bundles.  I thought my husband wouldn’t want to deal with cloth diapers and I wasn’t sure I wanted to either so the disposable option of gDiapers seemed ideal.  I started looking into other diapering options and came across The Cloth Diaper Whisperer blog which helped me learn about all the awesome accessories that make cloth diapering so much easier. 

One night I was at a friend’s house and noticed she had a diaper sprayer in her bathroom. I asked her about it and she showed me her cloth diapers.  I talked to my husband about wanting to cloth diaper a baby and he was all for it! (Thank goodness!) Since then I have purchased numerous cloth diapers: Fuzzibunz, Bumgenius, Rumparooz, Grovia, Thristies, etc. and have built up a nice stash for a new baby.  

Now combining all three; raising money for LLS, running, and cloth diapers; I thought that hosting a cloth diaper raffle would be a great way to raise money for a wonderful cause, share my story, share my love of cloth diapers and running.  So if you want a chance to win some awesome prizes, including a $25 gift card from Diapershops.com, please check out my raffle and make a donation of $1 or more to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society via this link or on my blog and don’t forget to fill out this form. Thanks and good luck! 

By Sarah Spencer