With myself and my wife Sally, we have got four children. The oldest is a girl called Kemi, she's twelve and she's at secondary school. I have three boys, Colm who is at the top of junior school, about to move into secondary school and then Dominic who has just started at the junior school and Billy who is in his first year, the reception year at the infant school. It is Billy who has Downs Syndrome.

Okay, he is 5 years old. The thing he likes most is video. He has quite a variety of videos that he likes now. It used to be just one which was a Dave Benson Macton video but he has now gone through 'Fun Song Factory' and 'Shrek', 'Jungle Book', and his favourite at the moment is 'Sesame Street'. He likes cars. He has a particular lorry that he likes that he can't find at the moment so he keeps coming around saying 'lorry, lorry, lorry', but we can't find it. He likes football, playing football, certainly when the other kids are playing and particularly in the house he likes playing football. He likes music, he likes the computer which he is quite good at, he is getting more confident using the mouse to sort of find his way around different games and software.

But his limitations - he does have quite severe limitations. We are quite clear about that really, we know that he does, even in terms of other children with Down's Syndrome I would think at his age there are others who would be quite far ahead of him in terms of the more academic skills or language skills. He is quite good at 'Macaton' he has quite a lot of Macaton signs and he has quite a bit of spoken language now as well but a lot of it tends to be single word use or single sign and he is starting to put two signs together or more often now two words together, sometimes three as well but a lot of it isn't clear to other people who don't know him well or are not used to his language formation. But that is coming, he's making progress with that. That's fine, he's at that level.

The other thing he does which is sort of something he likes but is also a bit of a limitation in other ways is he gets a bit locked in to his own, not necessarily his own world but his own little game which is not very interactive with others. He is really into dogs as well at the moment. We had friends stay for a week or so and they had a dog with them so he became a dog and he has not really got out of it since, so he goes round finding sticks and holds them like he is wagging a tail, so he is really into that but that sorts of locks him into that. It is very hard to get him to play anything else or to join in with his game. He will occasionally do that with other things as well.

Sticks he will use as drum sticks but he will wander around the house with sticks in his hand and play and sing to himself, you can lose him for a little while in that sort of world. It's to such an extent that I think we have both queried or wondered whether he might have autistic features as well, but we are not really quite sure of that.

Physically he is very good. I think he walked at a reasonably early age, I think about 18 months he started to walk. He was slow to begin with walking out. As we were walking to Nursery a year ago he would want to be carried on the way home and stuff like that but now he walks quite happily down to school which is only quarter of a mile away. He will do that without problem. But also as a family we go out for walks in woods and by the sea and he does really quite well and occasionally he will want to be carried and a piggyback sort of thing but depending on his mood and depending on the games we are playing along the way and if there are stones to throw in a river he can walk quite far. But it is slow.

As a family walk there is a big gap between those at the front and those at the back. But otherwise physically I think he enjoys playing football, he enjoys more and more running about and jumping up and down, playing on the trampoline. A little bit he will play in the park going down slides but sometimes he will go down once and that's it, he's done it. Other times he will go again and again.

His fine motor physical skills are quite limited and that's something that I think has hampered his learning and development in terms of he doesn't really enjoy drawing or even colouring or holding a paint brush to, a little bit with the paint brush, actually, he has had a go at. But things like holding a pencil I think he finds difficult so he just doesn't do it. He will avoid things that he is aware that he cannot do so he just doesn't do them.

It was more or less as soon as he was born. Sally in fact I think it was that spotted. I think I heard she said since she felt that he just didn't quite look the same as any of the others not that the others are all identical but she just felt that there was something in his look and then she looked at his palm and the single crease across his palm she queried and thought from there that he had Downs Syndrome and asked me and I thought well, yes, possibly, so that must have been within the first hour of him being born, so were alone together in the maternity room after his birth.

Interviewer: What was your reaction?

I think just curious, really, to find out. I think for both of us, because my professional work is with adults with learning disabilities and Sally as a physio has always worked with children with physical disabilities mainly but also with learning disabilities I think we were both fairly well steeped in the world of special needs or disability and it's something that with each of our children I think that we had always in pregnancy considered that well that would be a possibility so I think for us it wasn't such a shock that we couldn't, you know maybe for other parents they would never have expected anything but a perfect child, but we had that thought in our minds, maybe not to the fore front but in the backs of our minds that that was a possibility.
So I don't think it was the bolt out of the blue that maybe other people experience. It was a surprise but not a dreadful shock. I think we were just quite accepting of that fact really from the word go. I don't think it's, there are other difficulties which maybe we will cover but the fact of him having Downs Syndrome in itself wasn't, we didn't feel was a huge disaster or anything.