Just before Christmas, my gorgeous niece Ellie phoned me and told me that they had been discussing fund raising ideas in their charity group at school. She said that she was going to spend her Christmas holiday raising money and the charity she had chosen to support was naitbabies. Ellie is 7 (almost 8), and her little cousin Ethan was born 18 months ago with NAIT. Ellie has been keen to learn about the condition and what Ethan has been through, and was excited to be able to do something to help. She was sent the NAIT bear to help her to explain at school what NAIT was all about, along with some leaflets and stickers to hand out to her teachers and friends. Ellie and her best friend Elena decided that they wanted to raise money for naitbabies together. They are both in year 3 at Halterworth School, Romsey and are members of the charity group. Between them they decided to do a sponsored read. The pair of them spent their entire two week Christmas holidays sat reading books. They got their teachers, friends, parents, friends’ parents, parents’ friends, family and anyone else they could think of to sponsor them. Ellie kept me updated with how many pages she had read – by day two she had already read 283 pages! In total she read 10 books which was a total of 1918 pages. Elena too read an incredible 10 books and between them they raised a whopping £270! Ellie said “A group of us at school wanted to raise some money for charity. Me and Elena decided to raise money to help my cousin Ethan and babies like Ethan. I really enjoyed reading all the books, the Secret Seven’s were my favourite”.
(Becky Robinson)
