Miles In Memory : Update

Well, the past few weeks have been a bit of a blur and have been filled with the love (and deep missing) of so many babies.

A small idea (http://wp.me/p7boXM-vD£) that I thought would be good to motivate us to meet our crazy aim of waking 310 miles throughout October (between me and The Wife) took off – big style. Never underestimate the desire a bereaved parent has to have their baby remembered, honoured and shared with the world. And most of all, the indescribable joy you have to see your baby’s name written by someone else. Being one of those people, I don’t know why I didn’t expect to have such a response…

Within a week we exceeded target and have approximately 350 babies to be honoured this month. For the miles that we cant cover, other members of #teamleo who are doing their own challenges, will dedicate their miles to babies gone too soon.

We are on day four. We both ache. We’ve clocked up about 7-10 mile a day each. We are working on getting ahead now whilst the weather is good, incase we fall behind towards the end of the month.

Personally, it’s done the trick. You can’t just opt out of honouring someone’s baby. We are trying hard to make sure we get good pictures, thinking of different places to go to mix it up, and making sure we keep a close eye on our mileage so we don’t short change ourselves either!

I hope the world understands the significance. For every baby, for every mile, for every name – that’s a family  walking through the tar of grief. A life lost. An unknown amount of possibilities.

For every photo that I share, that symbolises not just the name in the photo – but a new baby gone too soon, right now. 10 babies are stillborn every day in the UK. These are real babies, not statistics. There are people who life’s are shattering right now. Who are living that day, right now.

Yesterday’s #CaptureYourGrief was hard. Really hard. It’s probably one of the first days I’ve posted and ran. We all felt it. Sharing the times that our hearts broke. It was like all the bereaved parents hearts broke together yesterday, all over again. But doing this grief work at the same time as honouring these babies has meant that I’ve got to met some of the babies that I did not now, and that I am now honouring. And that is just… pure motivation, a pure humbling reminder of what it’s all about.

Please follow us on Facebook and get to know the babies that we are honouring.

This is all in aid of Aching Arms. Every £10 raised funds a bear to comfort other bereaved parents. If you’d like to donate, please use this link : uk.virginmoneygiving.com/someonespecial/LeoForAchingArms

Here are the 43 babies honoured so far.