SUPERJOSH founder Dawn Fidler brings you her latest blog

IT is 17 years today since our amazing boy Josh was born, and, if I'm honest, it's hard to know what to say.

Birthdays have always been a huge thing for our family, with everyone making a big deal of every milestone and relishing the opportunity to have a party.

Josh certainly loved being the centre of attention.

Some special memories that I have are, on his third birthday, we had a party at Pilsworth Wacky Warehouse. Josh was so advanced with his drawing and writing, but he was a bit slower taking up with climbing.

This day though, he decided to show off and climbed all the way to the top of the play frames by himself. He was so proud.

As all the children sat down for their party food, the staff encouraged them all to bang on the table and shout "we want food, we want food".

Of course, Josh loved it and quickly became convinced this was what he had to do for every meal time. It drove me mad!

We'd always celebrated Josh's birthdays, but after he was diagnosed, it became even more important.

It's a sad reality, but children with special needs and disabilities often find themselves excluded from parties, and we definitely saw a dramatic decrease in the number of invites Josh received after his surgery.

Making sure his parties were fabulous and the envy of everyone else became a bit of a mission for us all.

For his ninth birthday, we had a jungle-themed party, complete with different gazebos and netting and buckets of slime for children to play with. Everyone dressed up and someone bought us an amazing snake cake.

It was so much fun.

Josh turned 13 just after we launched the charity, and that's when we had our first party in Heaton Park with friends and family.

It was a beautiful day and it was really great having so much fun, and one of Josh's social media follower friends came all the way from Liverpool with the most amazing superhero cake as a surprise!

Josh's last party was held at The Village Hotel, and marked him turning 14 and the first year of the charity.

I don't know any other 14 year old who had more than 200 guests at his party and it was a huge celebration and he loved it.

We didn't know for certain, but we had almost resigned ourselves to the fact this would be his last birthday with us and we made it as amazing and as special as we could.

Memories that we now have to treasure forever.

It will be a very tough day for us all, but it would be impossible to not celebrate August 10 as Josh's birthday.

Everything about Josh's life was, and still is, a cause for celebration.

We're going to be on The Rock throughout the day with a super hero-themed event, and then back to Heaton Park on Saturday for another party in the park.

We hope to see as many of you as possible, and remember, have a large slice of cake to celebrate our boy.

Finally, as we have always said, let there be no sad tears, only happy tears remembering our amazing boy.

You can donate to The Joshua Wilson Brain Tumour Charity by simply texting SJBT13 followed by £1, £2, £5 or £10 to 70070