Family launch charity drive with Cork company in aid of Down Syndrome Centre

GINA and Karol Daly are a veritable tour de force, whose unquenchable zest for life and passion for their family and work is truly infectious.

Their whirlwind love affair began when a chance encounter one April led them to get engaged the following month, and married six months later.

Impulsive, passionate, determined, and completely devoted to each other, their families and friends worried it wouldn’t last.

Now 15 years later, they are happier than ever, with three beautiful children (Holly 13, Ben 11, and Gene, 15 weeks), two best-selling cookbooks and a third one on the way, a hugely successful handmade card-design business called Bitchbox.ie, and an online audience of more than 191,000 followers on their Daly Dish Instagram page.

FUNDRAISING DRIVE

They are now launching an exclusive collection of five Baby Bibs, in collaboration with the gorgeous Cork-founded children’s clothing company Babyboo, to celebrate World Down Syndrome Day, with €1 of each €5 bib being donated to the Down Syndrome Centre.

“I love design and illustration and wanted to create something different to the selection of gender-neutral bibs available on the market,” says Gina.

“A design that looked like a tattoo, something that really represents us as a couple, and one that could not be bought in any shop.”

Both she and Karol have many beautiful tattoos on their bodies and some of these have been recreated in the bibs.

“I designed a blue one with just an anchor on it and this was the first tattoo I tattooed on myself and on Karol,” said Gina.

“From the age of 11, I have always wanted to be a tattoo artist.

“But, as it is a male-dominated industry, I never got the opportunity to explore it as a career.

“So, I decided to teach myself how to do it and then practiced on my own body...

“And subsequently on Karol’s,” Gina adds with a giggle.

Ouch. That sounds like a very painful process!

“I think my concentration took over from the pain!”

“Karol and I both love the movie True Romance, starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette.

“The main characters, Clarence and Alabama, meet and fall in love in just one night. They wear cow print clothes and write cute notes to each other saying ‘You’re so cool!’”

So, as an homage to this movie, one of the bibs is a cow print design with ‘You’re so cool’ written in pink across it.

Another has skulls, dice, and swallows on it, a mixed-bag representation of all the tattoos Karol and Gina have between them.

Another is blue and yellow (the colours of Down syndrome).

Yet another is a nautical star with the word ‘lucky’ written on a scroll across it, an exact replica of a tattoo Karol has on the back of his arm.

PLANS FOR A THIRD CHILD

“Parents of a child with Down syndrome are considered to be the lucky few! And we are so lucky,” Gina insists. “We genuinely feel truly blessed.

“We had our two kids and thought we were done having babies, but in September, 2020, during the second lockdown and just prior to my 40th birthday, I found out that I had a missed miscarriage.”

Gina recalls: “I had a little bleed early on and had three weeks of horrendous stress, back and forth to the hospital to try to determine the cause of the bleeding.”

Gina was on her own, too, as no partners were allowed in for scans.

The hospital explained it was a missed miscarriage. Gina was nine weeks.

“My head was completely fried from the stress of it. I was emotionally wrecked”, she admits.

But Karol and Gina realised that they had been so thrilled at the idea of being pregnant that maybe they should try again.

“I was going to be 40 so we wondered would it even happen.”

To their delight, Gina became pregnant the following March.

On her due date for the baby that had been lost, Gina started to bleed very heavily.

“I bled for 10 days solidly. It was awful.

“I thought it was happening again and that I was just not meant to have another baby.”

Gina had no hope the day she went for her hospital scan. The doctor turned the screen away from her, out of respect. So, it came as an utter delight when the doctor turned the screen back to face Gina and said: “There’s your little baby and he isn’t going anywhere!! Go home now and enjoy your pregnancy!”

Given her age, the idea was mooted that Gina’s baby could have Down syndrome and she was offered a test to determine if the baby was positive. But she turned it down.

“I believed that if I did have a baby, then I was meant to be its Mammy.”

At the 20-week scan, all seemed fine and Gina was sent home with her baby photo. But a few days later, she got a call from the hospital to say that they had spotted on the baby scan that the baby’s femur was shorter than it should be, and that this was a potential marker for Down syndrome.

Again, Gina was offered an amniocentesis test but she declined. It was explained to her that some babies with Down syndrome can be born with heart problems and the hospital felt it would be a good idea to put a plan in place in advance of the birth, to have ICU prepared, if necessary.

So, Gina agreed and booked in for a neo-scan, a pre-scan before the more invasive amniocentesis test.

In the scan, everything was fine with the baby’s heart, and the femur was normal too.

So, Gina decided not to go ahead with the test.

“I suppose I always had an instinct; my gut always said this little baby has Down syndrome.

“But my feeling was that if the baby has Down syndrome, once he/she is happy and healthy, I don’t care.”

Prior to the baby’s birth, Gina had a 3-D scan, and she said she could see he had Down syndrome even then.

“I said it to the nurse at the time. And when he was born and they held him up for me, I knew instantly.”

Baby Gene was indeed born with Down syndrome.

“It’s funny, people are almost tip-toing around the topic of Down syndrome, afraid to look into the buggy,” says Gina,

“I say ‘This is Gene! He has 10 fingers, and 10 toes on his feet that will hopefully help him walk some day…”

“We do not define him by his disabilities. The joy and love I have felt in the past 15 weeks are indescribable.

“Beyond any of my expectations. I love him to the ends of the earth.

“Our entire family feel exactly the same. Gene is amazing, such a happy man and he smiles with his entire face.”