What is The Sidetracked Parent?

The Sidetracked Parent is a website and community born out of a need for one family to share what they had learned about being rare disease parents. They also wanted other parents to know they were not alone in their journey. While we may have been sidetracked from our original idea of parenthood, we can learn to navigate this world together.

Two children with rare neonatal diabetes brother and sister diagnosed with diabetes in infancy living with rare type of diabetes 2 babies with diabetes

A Rare Pair

While neonatal diabetes is rare and occurs in about 1 in every 400,000 live births in the United States, it is usually a "de novo" mutation, meaning it happens randomly. Our family somehow lucked out with 2. We may be rare, but we want to help as many other families as we can navigate the road in any way we can. 

Read More on Our Blog: Adventures in Kandyland

Original Drawing of the Monogenic Ribbon

Christy's mother was an artist and one day when she was visiting, they started coming up with an idea for a monogenic diabetes ribbon after being inspired by a breast cancer ribbon using a DNA strand

Mutated Gene in a DNA Strand

The inspiration for the red line came from several pictures on the internet depicting a red line in the DNA helix strand to represent a single genetic mutation.

Diabetes Awareness Ribbon

The blue and grey colors and the red drop of blood come from the diabetes awareness ribbon. Since it is still a form of diabetes, we wanted to show that connection. After all, we do still have to test blood sugars, even if some of us don't have to check quite as often.

Monogenic Neonatal Diabetes Awareness Ribbon

The final product was just putting it into a digital image so we could use it to create some of the products you see here in the store. We may not always use the ribbon on all of our products, but it is what got everything started so it is the beginning of our story.