Meet The Dale Tribe!


 2017-02-23

When I first started documenting our family’s life on YouTube three and a half years ago, I had no idea what a ride I was in for.

We’re vloggers. If you’re not familiar with the term, a vlog is basically a video log of your life. We have four kids ranging from 10 to 17. We started vlogging as a way to remember them at different stages and to have a record of the fun times we share.

I suck at scrapbooking, and that had a lot to do with why I decided to point a video camera (well, actually, in the beginning it was a phone) at our kids instead. We posted sporadically at best in the beginning, things like trips to the pumpkin patch, camping, a road trip to the Tetons. My husband, Jon, was supportive but not involved for the first three years.

In November of 2015 he decided to jump in with both feet. We began to post more regularly and got a bit more professional in the editing and thumbnails. Our channel began to grow.

As our channel grew, our youngest daughter began to wither. She was exhausted all the time, she lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose, she was desperately thirsty and had dark circles under her eyes. As her mom, I had that unshakeable feeling that this was more than just a virus.

Finally, after watching her get progressively worse, we scheduled a doctor’s appointment. I arranged for her to spend the day at the mall with her best friends after the checkup. That morning, she had blood drawn and gave a urine sample, and the doctor’s office told us they would call if anything showed up.

We headed to the mall, where I acquired one of their free wheelchairs for Aspen—her energy was almost non-existent, and I knew she wouldn’t make it long if she tried to walk. She had a fun day and made a sloth we named Shaun at Build-a-Bear (still a constant companion). I couldn’t fully enjoy myself—my girl was so ill and so not herself.

As I drove home with all the kids in the car, I got a phone call from Jon. He told me to drop the other kids at home and meet him at the doctor’s office. He suggested that Aspen might have type 1 diabetes. A finger prick at the doctor’s office revealed a blood sugar of 580 (even after I’d put her on a very low carb diet for several days because I suspected diabetes, as my dad had been diagnosed with type 2 the year before).

We rushed her to the ER in our small mountain town. I was in shock, completely unsure of what any of this really meant. It was my husband’s 39th birthday, and we spent it in the ER, where Aspen got her first-ever injection of insulin, something that would become a part of her daily life. Somehow in my mind, I thought they’d give her some insulin and then send us on our way. So when they were loading Aspen into an ambulance to transport her to a larger hospital with a pediatric ICU, I was in complete shock. We stayed three days there, then spent a day at the Barbara Davis Center in Denver where our other kids joined us to learn about taking care of Aspen.

I remember telling one of my friends (after showing her the giant textbook of things I needed to know to take care of Aspen) that moms should get degrees in different subjects. I felt like I already had a degree in dyslexia (two of my kids have it) and now I was going to be working on getting my master’s in diabetes care.

Throughout all of the insanity of Aspen’s diagnosis, we did what had become normal for us: filmed everything. When we finally got home, Jon edited all the content and put it up on YouTube.

Then magic began to happen.

A beautiful and amazing online community began to gather around us. Some had type 1 diabetes, some had other chronic illnesses, some were healthy; but we found common ground, and they began to circle around us and love us through the process of learning to live with type 1 diabetes (T1D).

Over the next few months, we started to get our Aspen back. She had energy and joy again. From the very beginning, we took the approach that we would choose joy over fear. That’s not to say that fear was never an issue; we just chose not to let it control us. Aspen’s middle name is Joy, and we were seeing more and more of it in her life again.

It has been a little over a year since we posted that diagnosis video, and we still have an amazing online community, although it has grown from a cozy 1,000 subscribers to over 85,000.

Some of our viewers have become very dear friends to us, and we are so grateful. Sometimes people ask me how we handled Aspen’s diagnosis and what we did to cope, and I realized that most people are very alone in all of this. We were so lucky to have such an amazing circle of people online. Since then, I’ve found the Beyond Type 1 app, and that has been equally amazing. I recommend it to people all the time, as I feel it is the closest thing available for most people to what we had.


See more of The Dale Tribe and read “And Me, Mommy?” by Kristina Dooley.

WRITTEN BY Amy Dale, POSTED 02/23/17, UPDATED 10/06/22

Amy Dale lives in the mountains of Colorado with her husband and four kids. They share their daily life and experiences on their popular YouTube channel The Dale Tribe. Amy is a massive geek who loves comic books, anime, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Kung Fu and K-pop. She is also the author of the novel, Off With Her Heart. She is a musician and songwriter and loves to dance! She's learning to be a mom to a person with type 1 diabetes and thoroughly enjoys hanging out with her husband and kids. You can see their adventures at www.youtube.com/thedaletribe.