Category Archives: Blog

December 2011

16th December 2011

Christian had his 6 monthly checkup today. All good with nothing to worry about. Apparently now that he has been clear for four and a half years, the chance of a relapse is “tiny”.

Hooray!!!

14th December 2011

We have ordered all the toys for Santa to deliver to the children’s wards at St George’s on the 23rd December. Ho ho ho!

12th December 2011

We have bought 20 cot mobiles for the Hedgehog Ward at Tunbridge Wells Hospital which Claudia is delivering next week.

10th December 2011

New Beacon Nativity

Christian and his class put on a lovely nativity play this year. The photos are here. If any parent wants a higher res copy of the photos please contact Peter.

3rd December 2011

Thank you to the lovely Leila Hacket at the wonderful Coco Cuscino for their continued support. They have just had an event to launch their amazing Christmas collection and gave a share of the proceeds to the Christian Blandford Fund.

1st December 2011

The Pinckney ward at St George’s now has a new Christmas tree and decorations thanks to The Christian Blandford Fund. Thank you to Darren Bowler and Marianne Sylvester for sorting it out.

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Christmas visit to St George’s

Just before Christmas, Christian, Peter and Henry went to St George’s again to be Santa and elves and hand out presents to children unfortunate enough to be in hospital during the festive period.

The Bowler family and the Hancox family did a great job of wrapping all the present and delivering them so they were ready for Santa to hand them out. This year we bought more than ever so plenty were left over for arrivals on or just after Christmas. Neil Berrecloth popped in to help and the play specialists, very efficient in sorting out the right presents for each child.

There are more photos on Facebook

The next day, I got this lovely e-mail

I just wanted to say “thank-you” on behalf of my son Alex, who received a lovely teddy. It really cheered him up, as did the visit from father Xmas and his little helper: his eyes lit up when he saw them (I think he was thinking “oh no, the door’s opening, someone in a uniform is coming to do something nasty to me”) and was lovely for his dad and mum to see. As you can appreciate, being in an isolation room at Xmas is pretty grim for a kid. Alex has been poorly all his life and is a “regular” at St George’s, despite living 60 miles away in West Sussex. The distance makes it particularly difficult as his brother William, who he is very close to, has to stay at his Grandma’s during his many stays at St George’s, so we are all split up as a family. Luckily, we were put on “home leave” for Xmas but must return next Friday.

I think your charity is brilliant. As soon as I read the poster in the posh new parents room I could tell that the person who wrote it had a real insight into life for kids and their families in this situation that only personal experience (unfortunately) can bring.

Merry Xmas to you all and keep up the good work!

Santa and the elves

 

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November 2011

23rd November 2011

Thank you to Sam Palmer and the Sevenoaks ladies joggers for donating £180 to the Christian Blandford Fund after they all ran the Brighton 10k and had a celebratory curry with Claudia. With gift aid, their donation is worth over £250.

20th November 2011

Congratulations to Claudia for raising over £2000 for the Christian Blandford fund and running the Brighton 10k in 1hr and 1 minute!

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Take That Tickets!!!

2nd July 2011

Hi all – we have 2 more Take That tickets to sell to raise money for our bike ride.1st July 2011 – More take that tickets!!!!! – this is from Fiona, one of the Blondes on bikes

TEXT ONLY your bid to Caroline Chalkley on 07788 598718 Opening/Reserve bid is £500 for both or £250 each

Bidding Closing 5pm Sunday 3rd July

2 x VIP – TAKE THAT TICKETS

WEMBLEY 6TH JULY

‘ROYAL ENCLOSURE’

BLOCK 252 ROW 1

All proceeds to go to www.theblandfords.com/christianblandford Fund

Good luck

x fi

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Blondes On Bikes

Blondes on Bikes

Caroline Watt

Rachael Morgan

Fiona Spencer

Caroline Chalkley

378 Kilometres, 3 days, 4 blondes!

Blondes on Bikes – for one weekend only!

16th – 19th June 2011

Who would have thought any good could ever come from a mid-life crisis?? Turning 40 years can make people do the strangest of things – we have a bought a lot of lycra and decided to cycle from London to Paris – for one weekend only “Blondes on Bikes” go on tour!

The “Blondes on Bikes” team is a small collection of 40ish year old mums with a total of 10 children between us.  We all live Wandsworth, so our local hospital is St Georges.  It is no surprise that St Georges provides a full range of General Paediatric Medicine inpatient and outpatient services.  There are five children’s wards including eight Paediatric Intensive Care Unit beds for critically ill children.  The BoB team feels lucky that it has not had to use any of these services, but being in the heart of “nappy valley” there are plenty of families that have and the wonderful resources available are stretched to their limit.

Here is the fundraising page

The Take That tickets raised an amazing £1300. Even better, Mark Owen and his lovely wife, Emma, donated a second set of tickets for the people who came second in the auction and offered £1350 for another set. This brings the total raised by the blondes on bikes to over an incredible £7000. Thank you so much!

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Blondes On Bikes

Four mum’s from Clapham are taking part in an amazing cycle ride to Paris. These are their words not mine…

Who would have thought any good could ever come from a mid-life crisis?? Turning 40 years can make people do the strangest of things – we have bought a lot of lycra and decided to cycle from London to Paris – for one weekend only “Blondes on Bikes” go on tour! 

The “Blondes on Bikes” team is a small collection of 40ish year old mums with a total of 10 children between us.  We all live Wandsworth, so our local hospital is St Georges.  It is no surprise that St Georges provides a full range of General Paediatric Medicine inpatient and outpatient services.  There are five children’s wards including eight Paediatric Intensive Care Unit beds for critically ill children.  The BoB team feels lucky that it has not had to use any of these services, but being in the heart of “nappy valley” there are plenty of families that have and the wonderful resources available are stretched to their limit. 

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New Laptops for St George’s hospital

We are in the process of ordering 8 shiny new laptops for the Pinkney ward at St George’s. They will be available for use by children and their parents. This will allow the kids to play games online, watch DVDs, use social networking sites and do homework. They will also be equipped with Microsoft Office so parents can catch up on work while they are on the ward.

We would like to thank the lovely people at Seareach UK, for offering to provide security labels for free. We contacted them for a quote and they offered us 100 labels free of charge. Thank you very much guys!

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February 2011

21st February 2011

Christian has been very keen to have some input into the site and has written the following…

Thank you for coming to my website. The Christian blandford fund needs LOTS of money to make the children with cancer more happier. We need even more money for the St Georges hospital. If you like making children feel better then you definitely need to raise some money!

Well there you go! 😉

February 2011

The New Logo!!!

You have probably noticed that we now have a fantastic new logo. It was designed by Simon Brown of Shiny Brown Design. Simon gave up his time and expertise and refused payment for his services for which we are very grateful!

The other exciting item of news for the fund is that we are now a registered charity with the registered charity number 1139614. You can see it’s listing on the Charity Commission website.

January 2011

Christian’s Nanny, June Arthur, performed a demonstration of preparing Spanish tapas to the ladies of the NWR in Wimborne, the ladies generously donated £67 to the Christian Blandford Fund.

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Father Christmas Visit to St George’s

Peter put on a Father Christmas outfit and went to St George’s to hand out presents with his two little helpers Henry and Christian.

Santa and his little helpers
There are more photos here. Some parents wanted copies of the photos, they can be ordered directly from photobox. If you have not used them before send me an e-mail at peter@theblandfords.com and I’ll send you an offer code for 50 free prints. A big thank you to Hugh Miller, the very talented photographer who took the photos for us and donated his time and expertise.

It was a lot of fun, made easy by the very organised play specialists at St George’s. Thank you also to Darren, Corrine, Emily and Amy for collecting wrapping and delivering the presents to the Hospital, they truly did all the hard work!

The presents were all paid for from The Christian Blandford Fund and we are very grateful to the enormous support that we receive from the friends that support us.

It was great to see Maz, one of the very skillful nurses at St George’s using the portable ultra sound machine that we supplied. At over £20,000 it is not in the NHS budget but makes inserting needles into children’s veins a much less traumatic and painful experience. Something we felt strongly was worth our investment!

So we can continue this kind of work, please consider us if you are raising money for a charity event or are about to make a festive charity donation. Thank and Merry christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year!

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Visit To St George’s

Darren Bowler and Amy Hancox are trustees of the Christian Blandford fund and joined me on a visit to St George’s to discuss future projects and look at some of the recent purchases and projects we have been involved with. Here are some of the pictures.

Darren, Amy and Rachel

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