Sandi Harvey nearly lost her little girl once before. She was five months pregnant, and started bleeding. Panicked, she stayed in bed for weeks. Four months later, Leisl Smith arrived in the world at 5.18am on April 2, 1989, a pink, scrawny little thing with a mop of dark hair.
‘‘My heart wanted to explode and scream out to the world that I had this beautiful gift I had been entrusted with,’’ she says.
Sandy thinks about that morning often, now. She relives it on Leisl’s birthday, but the memory pops into her head randomly, too — when she's driving down the road, or at the shops, or having breakfast.