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her during that traumatic process. I honestly don't know how we would have coped with all that happened and the devastating information we were given in the following weeks if we hadn't loved her so passionately. Nor do I expect she would have survived if she hadn't somehow sensed how much she was loved in those first few weeks when her heart-rate plummeted more than once and she came so horribly close to dying.

That bond of course has just intensified over the past nine years and has undoubtedly helped see us through many more crises with our very fragile, yet oh-so-courageous little Aussie battler. It has almost certainly given her the will to keep fighting too.

Our little boy was born just over three years after our daughter and the circumstances were quite different in a number of ways. I did not endure a tortuous labor and I got to see him the moment he was taken, screaming lustily, from my womb. I still did not get to hold my baby right away though because I was taken to a recovery room while the effects of the epidural anaesthetic wore off. So it was quite some time before I was taken back to my ward and got to see him again. By then he'd been examined by a paediatrician and my husband had accompanied him back to the ward, where his sister and some special friends who are like surrogate grandparents to our children were waiting.

Although I loved him from the start though, the bond was not like it was with our daughter from the outset. I am inclined to think maybe that was partly because it didn't need to be so strong with him. Maybe it was also partly because I didn't go through the normal process of childbirth with him. I'm glad I did at least get to see him being taken from my body though - that was very special and important to me. I also wonder if there were psychological and hormonal reasons why I didn't bond with him the same as I did with my daughter right at the beginning - reasons related to all the trauma we'd experienced in the three years between their births and the fears and other intense feelings I had experienced and was continuing to experience.

Also, there were difficulties in those first couple of weeks related to his feeding. He wasn't getting adequate sustenance from me and breast-feeding was generally proving to not be the beautiful, warm and fuzzy experience I'd longed for. He screamed a lot because he was hungry - and then eventually he rejected me altogether as his milk supply. This happened when he was introduced to the bottle

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