Today our little girl and middle child is four years old. She is full of energy, occasionally cheeky, and more than a match for her older and younger brothers. She is determined, fearless and, as we have always known, amazingly brave.
For evidence of just how brave she is, we need only look to the scar that runs halfway down her chest, a reminder of the open-heart surgery she underwent as a baby.
Our daughter was born at 37 weeks weighing a little under 3kg. She was a happy and reasonably settled newborn who, like her older brother, was always a bad sleeper.
Yet she was so very different from her older brother. She didn't feed well and attempts to introduce solids at six, seven and eight months failed miserably. On top of that, she was too tiny and just not growing.
Both her weight and my instinct told me something was wrong.
At the age of nine months she was as admitted to hospital with pneumonia and that was when a doctor first heard a heart murmur. Heart murmurs are reasonably common, but an electrocardiogram (ECG) revealed some abnormalities.
