Awareness Lunch in Honor of a Friend

Several months ago I was involved in a great opportunity to lose weight and train for running in the Pittsburgh Half Marathon.  During this training I met a bunch of wondeful people that I am still in friends with.  It was fantastic.  One person in particular became a fast friend.  She is one of those people that I felt like I had known my whole life.  We instantly bonded over crazy motherhood things and working hard to lose weight while training to run an awesome race.  She is a guidance counselor at an elementary school and has even written a book (link below) about helping your child to cope with death.  Lori is an amazing person all around and I consider myself to be so blessed to call her my friend.

In August, I got a message from her.  I knew that she had a history of breast cancer in her family and that she was going in for a biopsy.  The message read, "Well, got my results back yesterday.  I do have cancer - but the good news is that they caught it early!"  She is handling it all amazingly well and her prognosis looks really good.  She is even blogging about her journey and you can read her amazing story here.

Here's a special lunch for my girls, in honor of my "Irish Sister", Lori.  We pray for you daily!  To everyone reading this, be smart and get checked.  Early detection is key, just ask Lori.

Our main entree is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that have been cut with awareness ribbon cookie cutters.  We used pink food safe markers to make them into breast cancer awareness ribbons.

Our vegetable side is carrots.  We nickled them and put them into a triangle shaped silicone mold.

Our fruit side is strawberries and raspberries.  We added a breast cancer awareness ribbon pick to them.

Finally, our dairy/dessert is vanilla yogurt with breast cancer awareness ribbon sprinkles.