Wow!

Hello everybody. What a week it has been! The website was launched last Thursday and what an amazing response I have had! Firstly, I am on the homepage of Sheffield Children's Hospital's website, so please do check this out.

I then appeared in The Sheffield Star, which I now have a copy of myself after driving around much of the city late at night! The article can be read here:

http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/health/local-health/ellie-s-website-a-uk-first-1-6175459 Following this, I popped up in The Chesterfield Post, which can be read here:

http://www.chesterfieldpost.co.uk/sport/other_sport/othersport_00000064.html There is a rumour that some other papers are going to report it, so do watch this space! If you follow CP Teens UK on Facebook and/or Twitter, you'll get the press updates even quicker. I must admit, it did shock me a little bit to wake up this morning to texts saying 'You're in the papers and all over the internet!'. So, I thought I'd tell you a funny Cerebral Palsy related story that happened to me today. I was filling in a form online, which asked me to state my disability, which is obviously Cerebral Palsy. Bear in mind that I've had it since day 1 and I've had to write it thousands of times over the years, I couldn't spell it to save my life - I HAD 4 ATTEMPTS, 4! How bad is that? Anyone would think I acquired it yesterday! As promised, this blog is going to have guest bloggers, and today's guest blogger is the lovely Ella Shipley from Leeds. I 'met' Ella on Twitter, which is where the inspiration for this website came; I was meeting all these lovely CP Teens on Twitter, but when limited to 140 characters, the conversation wasn't exactly great! I have our next guest blogger currently working away, but for now here is Ella...

'Hey everyone! First of all, I’d like to thank Ellie for setting up CP Teens UK, its brilliant! So I should start off by telling a bit about myself, I’m Ella, 16, living in Leeds and I have left hemiplegia. I’m studying my first year at Health and Social Care at college and so far it’s going great! So living with Hemiplegia/Cerebral Palsy is pretty positive for me, it’s opened all sorts of doors for, such as meeting new people also living with cerebral palsy, fundraising for Hemihelp (a charity who support children and young people living with Hemiplegia) and much more! Sure we all have our bad days, but I try to focus as much as I can on the positives- living with my disabilities (I’m also visually impaired) has definitely impacted on what I’ve chosen to study at college and my career path. I think in today’s society, it’s extremely important to try and educate people about disability and how they view it, as some people are pretty much clueless! I’ve had some bad experiences in the last year of people using derogatory words linked to my Hemiplegia which has made me even more determined to raise awareness of my condition and disability attitudes. Since I’ve started my campaigning (if you could call it that?) people have been very supportive and extremely helpful and I think it’s opened a lot of people’s eyes! So to finish, I’d like to thank Ellie once again for creating CP Teens UK, hopefully it will become a great place where lots of people will continue to share their experiences of living with Cerebral Palsy. I hope you find this little post interesting Ella'