I envied Siân's extra time with her both during her maternity leave and afterwards, as they were incredibly close and always seemed to have had such fun. Often I would get home from work and find them snuggled up together exhausted.

I had bath time every night as my special time with her, reading books, squirting water, playing with toys and bubbles, every minute was special.

Siân really didn't want to go back to work but we thought that nursery would be an important part of her development; Indya started at nursery 3 days a week, shortly before her 1st birthday. She loved it and flourished there; being grouped with slightly older children it seemed to speed up her development.

She adjusted very quickly, much to Siân's distress, after just a few days of uncertainty she started to treat it as a home from home. She would walk in, take off her own coat, sit down for breakfast and wave us off with a bye-bye. But there was no better feeling than when returning to pick her up she would drop whatever she was doing and run across the room to give a welcome hug and a pat on the back.

Indya had a confident and carefree nature, a little nervous at first when entering a room of strangers but she soon started showing off in front of them.

She was independent and determined; we worried for some time as she went through a stage of refusing to be fed, before realising that she wanted to feed herself; many mornings we lay in bed listening to her through the communicator, she would practise saying words over and over again until she got them right; once I held out a hand to help her down the stairs but she snatched hers away and holding it to her chest tightly she proceeded to walk carefully down the full length of the stairs.

She loved music and dance and would often burst into spontaneous dance when a song appealed to her; she became a real show off at Jo Jingles, dancing in the middle of the group.

Having a fascination with water she took to swimming straight away with fearless confidence; she'd have a huge open mouth grin before going under the water and still have it when she surfaced. She got so excited at seeing the sea on our first summer holiday that we thought that she was going to burst.