Day after day she sees her sister wearing AFOS on her feet, she sees her standing in a standing frame, sitting in a supportive chair, walking with a walker, having to be physically moved from room to room and so on. She has attended numerous of her sister’s physiotherapy, conductive education and hospital appointments.

She has seen these things since the day she was born. She knows no different.

She accepts everything about her sister, looks up to her sister and wants to do everything her sister does. She is her sister’s greatest admirer.

She climbs in her sister’s equipment and tries to put the AFOS on her own feet.

She, already, at 1 years of age, watches everything we do to help her sister. She wants to share food with her and hold her cup to help her to have a drink. She tries to help buckle her sister into her equipment. She joins in with therapy. She takes it upon herself to walk up behind her sister in her walker, her Scooot and her standing frame and help her to move around the house and from one side of the garden to the other side.

She is too young to understand her sister is disabled or understand why our house is full of the equipment that her sister is entirely dependent upon, but by the time she is old enough to understand, it will not matter. She has already built up a perception of her sister and understanding the disability her sister has will not change that.

She will be her sister’s loudest cheerleader, the one that always makes her sister smile and laugh, the one that will always be right by her sister’s side, the encouragement to keep her sister pushing through and the one that picks her sister up when she falls down.

Yes, she has joined a family who has to spend a great deal of time doing therapy but also a family who will teach her what unconditional love and acceptance are, how to be compassionate and how to have a strong heart.

She will be the reminder for us to take a break from therapy, to have fun, to go out together and explore the world and make memories together as a family.

She was the final piece of our puzzle and our family is now complete.

She is Isla.

I still remember the day Annabelle sat in her first wheelchair, a powered wheelchair, on 13 March 2019. She was two years and 4 months old.

We turned up to the assessment in which Annabelle was set up in the powered wheelchair and had to show that she had sufficient cognitive ability to move the chair forward, backward, left and right and listen and understand some basic instructions: to go and to stop. It didn’t need to be perfect but she needed to prove she would be able to learn how to operate the powered wheelchair for us to be able to take it home.

Annabelle has always been cautious and reserved around new people and so far that hasn’t changed with age. She would always rather stay with me or her dad then get involved in an unknown situation. It can be frustrating for us sometimes (especially when it ends with tears) but I completely understand why she is that way.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it feels like for her to have the ‘device’ she uses to assist her moving her arms and legs and to support her in sitting just removed leaving her vulnerable. Being taken completely out of her comfort zone and entering a place of fear knowing that if she doesn’t like the unknown situation she cannot move to get herself out of it.

I placed Annabelle in the powered wheelchair. Immediately you could see the fear in her face.

She was sat in an unknown object with two strangers checking the set up and giving her directions BUT her hand was placed on the joystick, light pressure applied and suddenly she was moving. No other person was touching her but she was moving!!!

The fear vanished from her face and instead it lit up. She looked over to us and laughed. This was the first time Annabelle had been able to move away from us and at speed!

A year and a bit later the love for this piece of equipment has just got stronger, we love nothing more than going to large fields and just letting Annabelle go off and explore in her powered wheelchair. There is nothing more enjoyable than watching from a distance and seeing your non-mobile child being able to move around in her chair enjoying the independence it provides.

I remember her diagnosis day well.

It arose after we raised concerns about Annabelle still not being able to sit independently at 9 months old, favouring her right hand over her left hand, doing unusual uncontrollable movements and doing things that just seemed ‘different’.

For months prior I had been telling myself that she was premature and that she needed time but there was a niggling feeling at the bottom of my stomach that I just couldn’t get rid of… Was something wrong?

We were still under the local hospital for 3 monthly reviews due to her prematurity. We went into what turned out to be our final meeting and we were forced to ask whether she had cerebral palsy.

Whilst the consultant didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no either but confirmed he would refer us to a child development centre where within 2 minutes of the doctor looking at Annabelle she was able to confirm she did have cerebral palsy affecting all four of her limbs and advised that it was ‘quite bad’. We were told she would need physiotherapy and an MRI but other than that we were not given any indication of what to expect for her future and her mobility.

The next few months following diagnosis were very hard.

Once we had processed Annabelle’s diagnosis as well as we could at the time, we had to start telling family and friends and explaining Annabelle’s difficulties and her differences. The hardest part was trying to explain something we ourselves didn’t really understand and people asking questions that we were unable to answer as we simply just didn’t know the answers.

Not because we hadn’t tried to educate ourselves but because no one child with cerebral palsy is affected the same so predicting her future was and still is simply impossible.

Two and a half years after diagnosis, here we are. We are no longer scared of cerebral palsy. We are embracing life as it is. We still are at the beginning of the long unknown road ahead which is full of bumps and hurdles.

Yes, some days are hard, but the cerebral palsy is an integral part of who Annabelle is and it will always be part of her. Yes she will live life ‘differently’, yes she will have to work harder than most to achieve things that just come naturally to others and yes there will be certain things she simply will not be able to do but we will not let her cerebral palsy diagnosis define her… She is MORE than the disability she has to embrace!