Aim for the stars

I wasn’t due for another six weeks – but that wasn’t stopping our little girl. ‘I think my waters have broken,’ I cried to my husband Alex, 40, as I woke up in the middle of the night at our home in Leeds.

‘What do you mean?’ he gasped.

A painful 60 hours later, on 27 August 2009, our first daughter, Ruby, now 10, was born, weighing 5lbs 2oz.

'You seem very brave'

Because she’d arrived prematurely the doctors wanted to keep us at St James’s University Hospital for a couple of days, to keep a close eye on her.

She seemed like a perfectly healthy little baby, and we were over the moon – but the nurses started to notice that she was sleeping a lot and not feeding very well.

‘We’ll get the pediatrician to come and check her over,’ they said.

And when they