parents

Watch this: the OTHER side of Katie Price.

I’m always fascinated by how we can think we know someone famous just from what we see of them in the media. There are certain celebrities whose public personas are sooo OTT, they’re almost cartoons.

Like Katie Price – aka Jordan. You know, she was married to Peter Andre (and one or two others I think), wears ridiculous clothes and lives her life through the pages of celebrity magazines who pay her a fortune to chronicle every melodramatic moment in her life.

But this week in the UK, in response to some appalling ‘jokes’ made by UK comedian Frankie Boyle about her profoundly disabled son Harvey, Katie showed a different side of herself.

In an open letter to coincide with the broadcast of her documentary “Standing Up For Harvey” about what it’s like caring for her disabled son, Katie let fly.

Here’s some of the doco:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JXUk_lOSM-o

And in the UK Press,  Katie Price writes:

“My son, Harvey, turned nine last month, and we held a little party to celebrate.

The only guests were immediate family — too much activity causes Harvey stress and his behaviour can become disruptive — but he did have a big cake decorated with a picture of a frog.

The cake and the frog obsession explain a lot about Harvey. Most mothers of nine-year-olds might boast that their child is learning French or the violin. I’m just pleased and proud that Harvey can draw, observe and see colours.

He recognises colours and shapes. He has even learned to turn them into pictures. He draws the same things obsessively, over and over again. First it was aeroplanes, then rainbows, now it’s frogs. That’s down to his autism. Like most children with the condition, he periodically gets fixated on one subject.

He is also compulsive about routines. Nothing must disturb Harvey’s ordered world, or there is hell to pay. The cake is another matter. Harvey eats and eats, and if I did not stop him he would do so continually. He is prone to weight-gain, but he is not greedy.

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He has a clinical condition — I’ll come to that later — which means he can’t control his appetite. The hormones that control his growth are also out of kilter. So he is bigger than most kids. But to the ignorant, Harvey is just a big, fat, blind kid — and he has been called that many times.

I’ve only skimmed the surface of the problems facing my much-loved eldest child, but by now you know enough about Harvey’s disabilities to understand the hurdles he leaps each day.

Read more here