Say Yes to Donating the Dress

Next week will bring the second installment in the Running For Good series.  For now, I wanted to talk about a donation I recently made.

This is my wedding dress.  It is lovely.  I wore it on the day that I married the best man I have ever known.  Since that day, it has hung in a bag in my closet.  I have moved twice since I was married, and both times I put that dress in the trunk of the car, not trusting it to a suitcase in the giant moving trucks we used.

I looked amazing in that dress.

Now, someone else will get a chance to look amazing in that dress.  I have donated it to Adorned in Grace.  They are a non-profit based in Portland, Oregon.  They take donated wedding dresses and resell them, then use all the profits to help victims of sexual trafficking move on with their lives.  You can read more about them on their website, including how to donate your own wedding dress if you so choose:

http://www.adornedingrace.org/

I even found a local cleaner here in Columbus who, in exchange for me paying the cost of shipping the dress to Adorned in Grace, will clean the dress for free and handle the packaging and shipment.  The owner of the dry cleaners, Margaret, personally took my phone call about the free cleaning and met me at the cleaners when I went to drop off my dress.

I hope that the person who buys my dress has as happy an ever after as I have.  I hope that the person who is helped by the profits from selling my dress has as happy an ever after as I have.  I adored my wedding dress, but I love what I can do by donating it.

Running For Good: Part 1

People run for a lot of reasons.  It can function as cheap(ish) therapy.  It's great exercise.  It's a way to get out and meet people when you're in a new place.  But it's also a mechanism by which you can do a lot of good in the world.  This is the first in a series of posts all about how to change the world - for the better - by lacing up your shoes and going for a run.  

Part 1 - Charity Miles

Charity Miles is an app, for both iPhone and Android, that lets you turn the miles you run/walk/bike into monetary donations to a charity of your choice.  There are a few limitations - namely, the charity of your choice has to come from their list of charity partners.  But, with that limitation noted, the rest is all up to you.  Large corporations will sponsor Charity Miles, like Chobani recently did, and give them a bunch of money.  Those funds are held in a big floating donation cloud (finance isn't my strong suit), waiting for someone to open the Charity Miles app and go for a run.  You choose your charity, choose whether you'll be running indoors or out, and then get your run on.  If you're competitive, or a fan of group participation, you can form a team and see how many miles you and your friends can run for charity.  

If you're having trouble choosing a charity, then you can pick a different one each time you go out.  Clicking on a charity gives you the option to immediately run for them, or to click their name again and read a short description of what they do.  I have all the charity partners listed at the end of this post, so you can give the list a quick perusal.  

Are you interested, but not really into cardio?  Even if you don't walk, run, or bike for charity, you can still donate!  The minimum distance to qualify for a donation is one tenth of a mile - 0.1 miles is all you need!  Use the app while you walk to work.  Park at the far end of the parking lot and use the app while you stroll from your car into your apartment, or the grocery store, or the bookshop.  If you logged one tenth of a mile every day, just walking to and from your house, you would give a bit over $9.00 to charity in a year. Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot to you, but imagine if everyone reading this post did that.  Those donations would add up fast!  

Breaking down those donation amounts for you, here's how it adds up:  For each mile you walk or run, $0.25 will be donated to your charity.  If you're into pedaling, $0.10 will be donated for every mile you bike.  And that's it.  You pay nothing.  Your charity gets money.  You get fit.  Everyone wins!!  Plus, Charity Miles does a ton of giveaways.  Sign up for their email list to be notified when new giveaways are happening, and you could win a sweet hoodie like mine!  

That's me trying to fake like I'm running in my kitchen.  But I look amazing in my new Pace On Earth hoodie, even with the ridiculous pose.  

So get the app and get out there!  Which charity will you choose?

Charity Miles charities:

- American Diabetes Association

- Habitat for Humanity 

- Stand Up To Cancer

- Operation Smile

- The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

- Alzheimer's Association

- Girl up

- Save The Children

- Feeding America

- Charity: Water

- Shot@LIfe

- World Wildlife Fund

- The Michael J. Fox Foundation

- Wounded Warrior Project

- ASPCA

- (RED)

- St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

- Autism Speaks

- Every Mother Counts

- Team Red, White & Blue

- Girls On The Run

- DoSomething.Org

- The Nature Conservancy

- Pencils of Promise

- The World Food Programme

- Special Olympics

- National Park Foundation

- Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America

- Team For Kids

- She's The First

- Soles4Souls

- Nothing But Nets

- Back On My Feet

- The Partnership For A Healthier America

- Achilles International

- The Ironman Foundation

- Vision Spring

Perspective

It's been a while, friends.  So I thought I would start back up with a bang.

As I type this, I am comfortably in my thirties, unemployed somewhat by my own choice, and the mother of a tiny child.  I spend my days managing someone else's poop and dreaming of a weekend all to myself the way I used to dream about dates with Brent Spiner or winning a copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

It is in these utterly normal circumstances that I have come to realize how totally fucking awesome I am.  Particularly, I have finally come, more or less, to really and truly appreciate my body.  For much of my life, I have hated my body.  My skin was never clear enough.  I weighed too much.  The size of my clothes was too big.  It all seemed to matter so much and none of it was ever good enough.

And that's how I thought when I weighed about thirty pounds less than I do now, and was a delectably young twenty-something.

To be fair to my younger self, the world works very very hard to make you think those things are important.  It's understandable that I would have been taken in, and that being unacceptable by advertising standards would have gotten to me.

I'm not exactly sure when I got over that, or at least got mostly over that.  Maybe it was the time Theo peed so much while napping in my lap that he wet through my pants, too.  When I went to change, I found that the pants I was wearing, which I had barely fit into after giving birth, could be taken off without undoing the zipper or buttons.  Maybe it was the first time I wore my running tights instead of pants, with a delightful tunic length sweater and a pretty scarf, and realized I was totally rocking it.  Or maybe, after having pushed a living breathing human being out of my body without pain medication and solely through my own brute strength, I just finally realized that the delightful flesh machine I call my body is pimp as hell.

Whatever.  The point is that I now wear leggings.  With t-shirts.  And I know I look good.  I know that, as I walk down the street in those oh so clingy and oh so insanely comfortable leggings, at least one person that sees me will wish they could look as confident and comfortable and totally awesome in my outfit as I do.  I used to be that person, the one wishing they could look like that.  I really wish I could go back and tell past me, shake past me until she believes, that she already looks like that.

I'll just have to know it for her.  In my god damn awesome hunter green leggings.