Finally arrived, Pump Party part II

The day the big box with the pump and all necessary equipment arrived was a day of celebration, as if our normal lives were waiting in that box to be unfold. After 5 months of waiting and longing, I was holding this pink (my daughter's choice) beeper looking device in my hand, finally. But this was only a beginning of a new journey and I realized that the next step would be to make my daughter like it and feel confident and comfortable enough to wear it. And so I emailed her teacher and asked to reserve a slot in their busy kindergarten schedule for a party.

Somehow my daughter's Pump party was a lot about carbohydrates, coming to think of it, just like diabetes... I wrote down some words; to teach the class a little about diabetes, about how brave my daughter was, about her new cool pump which they had all decided was actually a Nintendo DS, and basically I stretched almost exclusively the positive aspects of having diabetes; like having to eat candies to increase blood sugar when needed and knowing your body signs better than any physician. Next we went on to some arts and crafts. I made pump models that I cut out from a colorful thick craft paper and let each child decorate their own crafted insulin pump with stickers and colorful glue markers. Now it was my daughter's turn to teach her friends a thing or two about how to use it. We made up a game in which each child was holding their pump creation and a bag of gummy candies (Fruit Snacks in individual small packs work best for us in bringing up low blood sugar pretty fast and it worked great for the party too). My daughter proudly explained that when her blood sugar was high she needed to press some buttons in her pump, but when her blood sugar was low she needed to eat some gummy candies. So in our game whenever she says "high" the kids would press the buttons on their crafted pump and whenever she says "low" the kids would eat a few gummy candies, and no confusions! And finally, there is no real party without a cake so then we all had cupcakes. It turned out to be a pretty cool (well, at least for K aged kids and the school staff) successful party and also we made up a great game. The kids LOVED it! especially the part where they 'had to' eat candies. In fact they have been asking me ever since, on every opportunity, when we would play this game again or have another Pump party.