You helped little Eloise grow!

To all the wonderful people who gave so generously last year, we are so happy to be sharing with you a Moore family update on our past year. We have had some wonderful highs this last year and a great deal of firsts for our family. We are so happy to say that for the first time in Eloise’s life she was so stable and has begun to put on weight (even making it onto the growth charts for the first time in her life much to the excitement of us and her health team). Although Eloise still struggles with staying out of hospital when she gets a general virus, she has begun to bounce back a little easier.

Due to this wonderful gain, Eloise has been able to start preschool this year and is loving all the new social interactions that this brings. Eloise has been busy each and every day learning new skills and enjoying regular therapy to cement these skills as they are learnt. She loves Occupational Therapy the best and tells me all the time that she loves “Neisha” (Monisha, her OT). Eloise has also continued dancing this last year, learning skills such as plie, tapping and tumbles. Due to her love of all things animals, Eloise has begun horse riding through the wonderful company RDA (giving all children with disabilities no matter how minor or extreme the opportunity to learn new skills with the most amazing animals on Earth, horses). Eloise loves this program and currently is completing the mechanical horse side of the program where she learns balance, key words such as walk on, care, empathy and most of all has FUN.

Eloise’s speech has gone from strength to strength, and she has been able to express herself much better since using assistive technology, introduced to her in speech therapy, as a way to learn. Her favourite thing to say constantly when falling, being sad or just in general is “it’s ok, let’s try again!”

With one operation under her belt Eloise handled this like a pro. She never complained about pain and just got on with it. To be honest, she barley complains and always finds the happy side of every opportunity which inspires us each and every day to push through our own challenges because if a three-year-old can, why can’t we right!

We enjoyed a lovely trip to the beach at Christmas time this year and Eloise’s little brother Charles (Charlie), who also has cerebral palsy, was able to see the sand and waves for the very first time. Although not a fan of the sand, he did like the wind in his hair as he rode along in his little wagon with his helpful big sister by his side.

Using some vouchers left over from our cancelled covid honeymoon, we enjoyed our very first family holiday where we took a plane ride to the Gold Coast so Eloise could “go see dolphins”. We enjoyed many firsts on this trip such as waterslides, rides and even tasting fairy floss for the first time with Eloise saying, “it’s not yucky mummy it so tasty”.

Although we have had so many ups, we have had a few setbacks this year that as a mum is so challenging and upsetting wishing you could always make things better or easier for your little warriors. Just like we experienced with Eloise, when Charlie tried to progress onto solid food, he began to struggle with vomiting, choking and even refusing food. We tried everything to help him as a family, trying to keep our stress and concern to ourselves thinking we need to just keep trying. He then began to struggle with his weight gain, and we needed to intervene.

I am pleased to say although we still rely on bottles as the sole source of nutrition, with intense therapy, Charlie has begun to handle dissolvable foods and can even have the odd bite of a sandwich – YAY for Charlie but most importantly YAY for the therapy team at CPA and the Big Steps Fund.

Without the help and intervention CPA offers, Eloise and Charlie would not have progressed the way they have. This is what your donations do, they allow children to access early intervention to help these skills develop but its not just the children you help it’s the families, you allow them to be able to face each mountain knowing someone is on their side, someone cares and most importantly they are not alone.

We hope that this wonderful family update inspires you to keep donating knowing that your donation, no matter how big or small, makes such an amazing difference in all our lives.

Love and forever grateful,

THE MOORE FAMILY