Hello, thank you for taking the time to read about my crazy idea......

So I've had a crazy moment and agreed to do the 10k rough runner in July. I'm about as unfit as they come so training is tough to say the least..... But I might add I'm doing it for something extremely close to my heart.

Most of you will know my beautiful and mischievous daughter has profound health and physical disabilities and special needs for which are undiagnosed. Through my journey of being a special needs parent I've seen and experienced how difficult the simple things in life can be, such as days out, a trip to the park and finding activities suitable for families living with disabilities.

Just over a year ago a friend and I took matters into our own hands and set up "The Special Lioness".......
We are a couple of Mams of profoundly disabled children. We found each other at a local SEN sensory play group, organised by our SEN school and immediately (actually after a few stares and sizing each other up), realised that we both shared a wicked and very often weird sense of humour. We have since set up a local community group where we offer coffee groups, holiday play groups and a Facebook group chatting and sharing information and product finds and hacks to enable other parents, who perhaps aren’t yet ready to visit us and to show the world that we don’t need pity – just often a laugh and far too much tea and cake.
We talk openly about how much our children have turned our lives upside down and that we are effectively grieving for the family we imagined we would have, but we are also super positive about our journey (most of the time) and how we spot the rainbows through the rain and we have learned to dance quite well in the rain – together and dragged a few other mothers along for the dance too.
Both of our children are non-verbal so we have been booking ourselves onto Makaton courses in the hope that our children may one day be able to communicate with us and the world around them, and in turn you can now see us driving our cars singing at the top of our lungs and signing along too, hoping we are getting the signs right and we are not gesticulating to other drivers.
Our biggest aim is to make our journey a little more socially acceptable and to try to relieve some of the loneliness other parent carers often feel when looking after a disabled child, we try to be a support, a shoulder to cry on, a motivation and more importantly to surround ourselves in a positive environment. During the school holidays we host play and craft days for our families, to give them somewhere safe and accessible to go and explore the world around them and hopefully enable some form of socialisation with other families in the same situation and allow siblings to interact with other siblings – again going through the same journey. We host huge, crazy, fun, bonkers parties throughout the year, simply because children like ours don’t get invited to birthday parties or celebrations, so we are determined to throw parties in their honour and give them an experience every child should have.
Our biggest aim is to help make Memoires for families to treasure so we are looking into organising days out and special experiences but this comes at a cost; this is where your donations/sponsors come in, our big plan is to hire the River Escapes boat for our families and give them an experience/party they will never forget. Our children get so much from sensory experiences so the smells, sights sounds and motions from the boat will be amazing for them.

I'm sorry this is a long one but I hope you can see from this, that this is a huge passion of mine and that you can find some spare cash to sponsor me to help create some special memories for our amazing and brave children.