As you may be aware I haven’t writ­ten a blog post, well any­thing, on my web­site for a very long time – what can I say? Life is hec­tic! This doesn’t mean how­ever that I haven’t been busy, in fact I have so much to tell you I am going to have to put it all into bite‐size chunks ( apo­lo­gies to all the teach­ers out there for that bit of teacher speak!).

Why now? What has inspired me soo much that I have no choice but to write about it? Usually when some­thing good hap­pens I smile, yet with this par­tic­u­lar incid­ent I not only smiled, I pos­it­ively beamed and felt incred­ibly proud. What can it pos­sibly be you won­der?!

Well, it all happened last Sunday. Amelie had been play­ing round at her best friends house, Lara, ( you will get to know Lara very well because not only are Lara and Amelie best friends they are, in fact, inseper­able!). Anyway, when I went to pick Amelie up I was told that they had had a great time, espe­cially when they had raided the bis­cuit tin! Now this may not strike you as any­thing unusual, chil­dren are always raid­ing the bis­cuit tin the world over, but this raid took place in a non‐coeliac house­hold and it wasn’t until I got home that I real­ised how fant­astic this was.

You see if Lara’s mum had said that to me a year ago I prob­ably would have gone straight into a list of ques­tions like: Were they GF? Were there also glu­ten bis­cuits? Did every­body wipe their hands after­wards? etc etc. Yet this didn’t even to occur to me, you see Lara’s fam­ily under­stand the ser­i­ous threat of cross‐contamination and the effect it can have on Amelie. They have shown that being coeliac doesn’t make you dif­fer­ent, every­one can enjoy GF bis­cuits, so no‐one is left out.

GF has become a way of life for them so much so they don’t even notice it any­more! That’s the Gem, that is what is so fant­astic about that incid­ent, Lara’s fam­ily has embraced GF and has shown how easy it can be.

Thank‐you Lara, Mya, Kathryn and Gerry for mak­ing a little girl feel very safe and happy. X