10 for a day!

As you know, I don't get to find out my jersey number til opening day, but Ashley let me wear #10 for our Force events! I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was... don't worry, I took pictures.
On Monday morning we had physicals and then we took our first trip to Dunkin!!!! In case you don't know what the means, Dunkin Donuts is HUGE over here in the East and we LOVE it. Sooo, 9 months without it has been ridiculous and we were pretty excited for our first trip. Here's some pics:


In the afternoon we went to St. Luke's children's hospital to visit some of the children. We handed out Force shirts, bears, wristbands, hats and visors. All of the kids we visited were SO excited to see us :) It was really fun but sad at the same time. You could just tell by looking into their eyes how exhausted they were from whatever disease or illness they were going through. It was pretty cool to make them happy even if it was only for the few minutes we visited with them. The last boy we visited, John, was my favorite. We gave him a shirt and visor and he insisted on putting both of them on right away. Then when Belle, our mascott, came in his whole face lit up. It was a great experience and I'd love to do it again.
pictures: (1)quote from the hospital, (2)quote from the hospital, (3)team @ st. luke's, (4)margo and me, (5)john throwing his bear at Belle, (6)john reading to margo



Monday night we had an event at Philadelphia's most popular sports bar, Chickie and Pete's. We walked around and passed out schedules while the NPF draft video was playing on a few of the television screens. The food was great and we had fun, there just wasn't much of a crowd because the weather wasn't great.

Road Trip

Our road trip from Illinois to Pennsylvania was supposed to take 13 hours, 31 minutes according to Mapquest. But throw in a 2 hour delay to road construction, pulling over to check the oil when the check gages light came on, oh yeah and constant rain and you'll get there in SEVENTEEN! Gooood times, let me tell you. Margo Pruis, my roomie and fellow Reteran (to be explained later) and I headed out of Normal at approxiamtely 7:00am. Only one hour after the planned departure time, not too bad. We got on 74 (my IL friends tell me I can't say 'the 74') with high energy and excitement, thinking we'd get into Philly at 7pm. Ha ha ha, not quite. We hit the half way point at about 2:00pm. And then we only drove 5 miles in the next 2 hours! I guess there was some road construction on a bridge, so they had all the cars merge, exit, and get right back on. And apparently that takes two hours! Wow. During all that sitting, my poor little truck was being a baby and thought it had an oil problem. But it didnt, it was just turning the "check gages" light on for fun. But we still got out to check the oil, regardless. That was pretty fun. We stuck the stick thingy in there and it was to the third dot. Now I don't know much about oil, but my dad taught me about the dots, don't you worry! Aaaand we did it three times just to be safe. After the oil scare we pulled back into the stand-still traffic. We put some tunes on and performed a little concert for the cars around us. We even got a few honks! Margo dared me to let the goats out of the trailer in front of us, but instead I took a picture! We played a round of Hey Cow and went 4-4! It's a pretty self-descriptive game. When you drive by cows you yell "Hey Cow!!" and then you count how many of them turn to look. It's fun :) We stopped a few times to keep us and the T-ruck energized. Oh and we played the game where you try to hold your breath through tunnels. Holy cow there are some LONG tunnels in Pennsylvania. We decided not to play that after we got light-headed from one. We finally arrived in Essington, PA at about 12:30pm. Wooo hooo!! Back to Philly :)