Emma Garside of Withernsea, East Yorks gets pretty upset when someone refers to her daughter Charlotte as a baby.
That’s because her daughter isn’t an infant, she has Primordial Dwarfism.
“We’ve been told she looks like a porcelain doll, a baby in a pram and people still call her baby Charlotte, which riles me something chronic, because she’s not a baby, she’s 5-years-old,” Emma Garside told Barcroft TV in 2013.
Charlotte, who has a rare form of Primordial Dwarfism, was only two pounds when she was born. Charlotte’s condition is so rare that doctors didn’t even have a name for it, according to Daily Mail.
Not only does Emma have to worry about the things others say about her daughter, but she also has to worry about the fragility of her tiny child.
“When Charlotte was born she was extremely fragile. I have said she looked like a skinned rabbit,” Garside told Barcroft TV. “She had a little pink hat on and was wrapped in bubble wrap up till her neck.”
Doctors told Charlotte’s parents that her chances of survival were slim, but at 5-years-old she weighed nine pounds and was just under 27-inches tall.
Though that is similar to the size of a large newborn, that didn’t stop Charlotte from living a normal life.
“I see her as a normal 5-year-old, just smaller than a 5-year-old,” her sister Sabrina said.
Charlotte was so small that she was unofficially deemed “the smallest girl in the world,” according to Huffington Post.
“Although Charlotte is a one-in-a-million baby with some health problems, she is not the sort of person who will fade into the background,” her mother told Daily Mail when Charlotte was 5. “She may be small but she has a massive personality and wants to do everything a normal 5-year-old does. She is very inquisitive and the school have already told us she has a learning age of a 3-year-old, which is higher than we thought.”
And just like other children her age, Charlotte started school at the age of 5.
“Of course, I was worried she could get hurt by the other children, but she has her own tutor look after her and she’s not as fragile as you’d think,” Emma said.
According to Charlotte’s sister Chloe, Charlotte is made up of some “strong stuff.”
“She might look like a doll but she’s made of strong stuff. She loves tearing around the house and being thrown in the air,” Chloe told Daily Mail. “When people first meet her they are afraid she might break if they touch her – but she’s quite scrappy and doesn’t sit still for a second.”
Learn more about Charlotte’s amazing story in the video below.
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