Why Couldn't I Save My Baby Girl?

Jemma Roberts, 33, did everything to keep her daughter safe. So it made what happened next impossible to accept...

- Kim Willis & Amisha Desai

As I placed the bright pink bow on to my little girl, I smiled. I knew I was biased but she was the prettiest baby I’d ever seen. ‘You’re perfect,’ I said, covering three-month-old Sydney-May in kisses.

It was December 2016 and Sydney had completed our family. My partner Steve and I had been together for five years and had Kian, four, and Khai, two. I also had my four children from a previous relationship – Lauren, 17, Adam, 15, Rhys, nine, and Theo, seven – and Steve’s little boy, McKenzie, five. As you can imagine, family life was exhausting but such fun.

Yet Steve and I had longed for one more baby – and I’ll admit, we were hoping for a girl. So when Sydney had arrived on 6 September, I wept, drinking in her beautiful mop of dark hair and deep blue eyes.

Lauren and the boys loved her, too. She seemed to calm them and back at our home in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, the only squabbles were over who got to hold her next. We all marvelled over the little crease in her top lip when she smiled. And laughed at how she wiggled her legs when she was excited.

And now, aged three months and three days, she looked so gorgeous in her pretty pink headband and matching flowery dress. I told myself how lucky I was.

Only that night, she found it hard to settle. She’d had a touch of bronchitis so, after her feed at 7pm, I lay with her on my bed, gently soothing her until she drifted off.