Young athletes hit hard: $1K lost in youth league robbery in Robstown<\/a><\/p>\nBoxes upon boxes of Barbie dolls are now stacking up on the front porch of a local family’s home in Flour Bluff, all for a cause close to their hearts. They’re calling it the “Breakthrough Barbie Bonanza.”<\/p>\n
“It was like \u2014 it was a real life this is really happening,” said John Navar, who started the effort with his wife, Cheryl. “I was blown away.”<\/p>\n
Inside each delivery? Not just any Barbie but the Type 1 Diabetes Barbie.<\/p>\n
“This little heart on her arm is the CGM glucose monitor that she wears,” explained Cheryl Navar, a pediatric diabetes educator at Driscoll Children’s Hospital. “Kids wear those to check their blood sugar so they don’t have to poke their fingers continuously.”<\/p>\n
Cheryl works every day with young patients who face the challenges of living with Type 1 diabetes. Together, she and her husband wanted to do something special to help those kids feel seen.<\/p>\n
“I said, I wish I could give these to all the kids I work with in my clinic,” Cheryl recalled. “And he went, ‘I could do that.'”<\/p>\n
“I still don’t think she was quite prepared for what I was going to do with it,” John added with a laugh.<\/p>\n
John started spreading the word to friends and family and before long, the dolls started rolling in.<\/p>\n
“We had 74,” John said. “Minus one \u2014 we got to give our first one away yesterday.”<\/p>\n
What started as a single delivery quickly turned into a daily knock at the door with each box filled with another act of kindness. And now, hundreds more are on the way.<\/p>\n
“Now that we can give them to so many more, it’s pretty exciting,” Cheryl said.<\/p>\n
She’s seen both the heartbreak and resilience of the kids she helps every day.<\/p>\n
“I’ve seen her come down with the lowest of lows, heartbroken for some of these kids,” John said. “A kid goes from one day being a normal five-year-old suddenly you have to regulate your sweets and give yourself shots.”<\/p>\n
The effort also comes from a shared understanding.<\/p>\n
“We have three children with genetic disorders,” John shared. “We know what it’s like for a kid to deal with a lot of medical stuff.”<\/p>\n
And, as it turns out, Cheryl’s love for Barbie played a big role too.<\/p>\n
“I try not to count them,” she laughed. “Too many to put on the shelf.”<\/p>\n
When Cheryl discovered Mattel had made a Barbie with a glucose monitor and insulin pump, she knew it was something special.<\/p>\n
“If Barbie can handle diabetes,” she said, “these girls can handle it too.”<\/p>\n
Now, the couple is setting their sights on a big goal: raising $100,000 to make sure even more children living with Type 1 diabetes can receive one of these dolls.<\/p>\n
“The big goal here is to get enough money to get in front of Mattel, so I can buy an entire run of these dolls to hand out,” John said. “And while I’m there, I figure why not ask for a Type 1 Ken doll, too?”<\/p>\n
From one faith-led idea to a porch full of pink boxes, the Navars are proving that a little kindness can go a long way toward bringing joy to kids who need it most.<\/p>\n
The couple hopes Mattel takes notice of the growing support.<\/p>\n
They’ve set up a GoFundMe<\/a> page to help buy more dolls and they plan to distribute the first round to patients at Driscoll Children’s Hospital next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Boxes upon boxes of Barbie dolls are now stacking up on the front porch of a local family’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":["post-1563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}