As some of you may already know, our daughter, Elise, was born with a Cleft palate. We were not aware of her having this birth defect as it cannot be identified in antenatal scans. It was only found to be present once she underwent her routine medical, at this stage Elise had gone 14 hours without being able to feed due to the Cleft. To resolve this she needed to have a Nasogastric tube fitted (a tube inserted through her nose and leading to the stomach, to allow milk to be syringed). As you can imagine, this was a very distressing and emotional time for us being told that our baby girl had medical problems

We spent a further 3 days in hospital being introduced to the Cleft specialists who would support us; learning to feed Elise with special bottles, and explaining the network involved in her care. We were told how Elise may go on to suffer further side effects linked to being born with a cleft; speech and hearing problems being the most significant.

A cleft is when separate areas of the face do not fuse together properly when a baby is developing during pregnancy. The exact cause of this remains unknown, yet it is the most common facial birth defect, 1 in 700 babies are born with a cleft.

Surgery to repair clefts is performed from between 12 weeks and 12 months of age. The minimum number of operations a baby with a cleft lip and palate can expect to undergo is 4.

At present, Elise is due to have her palate surgery between 10 and 12 months, after that they can reassess what further treatment she will require depending on how successful the operation is.

We are incredibly lucky to have the support network provided to us by CLEFT, which will allow Elise's impairment to be resolved so she can go on to lead a normal life. However CLEFT still need vital funds to research further as to why this birth defect occurs, and also, to help children in developing nations, where there is no state provisions for repairing clefts, and responsibility for tackling this problem lies solely at the doors of charities.

If you can, any sponsorship towards this cause, which means so much to us, would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks for reading our story, Darren.