Thanks for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page.

5 years ago we were blessed by the birth of twin boys, Finlay and Lewis, closely followed by Maxwell 17 months later.  It soon became apparent that Lewis's development was following a different trajectory to the other boys and after many tests he was diagnosed with a very rare genetic condition known as a 4q deletion.  Due to its rarity, there was very little information about what this meant, what we should be doing or what we should expect over the years and this is where our involvement with Unique began.

Unique are a repository of information about rare genetic conditions which aims to inform individuals, parents and professionals involved in care or scientific research by gathering as much sparse data from across the world.  They provide contact details of others with the same or similar conditions to enable families to support each other and share experiences, thereby helping prevent the isolation of not knowing what the outcome of a diagnosis might be.  To put this in perspective, when we went to discuss the diagnosis with the geneticist, all she could tell us was what she had read from a Unique document.

Unique are quite simply unique.  There is no other resource or organisation like them.  They often don't get the publicity of other charities but work tirelessly to help families who don't know what the future might hold.

 So my wonderful family decided that we should do something suitably unique and all run either Half or Full Marathon in Edinburgh this May 29th- which, if you know any of us, you'll understand what a challenge this'll be!  The team is: Martin (Tin Man) Crabbe, Tony (yes, the one who wrote a book) Crabbe, Fiona (Girl-Power) Bissell, Gerry (the Machine) Crabbe, Clare (Lightening) Donoghue, Neal (The Running Man) Marshall and Doug (the Lava Lamp) Crabbe.

Thanks for taking the time to read all this and for your astounding generosity- it really does mean so much.