Many of you know that we were expecting our first child at the end of this month. All was fine at the 38 week check, but unfortunately our baby was never to make it, as we discovered at the weekend that the baby had died.

Our beautiful baby girl, Amber Mallison, arrived at 17:04 on Tuesday 25th January weighing 5lb 12.  She was just perfect.

We spent some very special time with her before saying goodbye.

As we know you will all understand, we're lost for words to describe our sadness.  We have been amazed, and grateful for the support that we have received from family and friends, and from an amazing team of mid-wives at West Middlesex Hospital.

As some of you will also know, Duncan has always been planning to run the Seville marathon early in February.  We now intend to go to Seville together, and Duncan will run in memory of Amber, hoping to raise some money to support the "Sands" Why? campaign which hopes to raise awareness of the issues surrounding baby loss- both stillbirth and neonatal death.

We've therefore set up a fund-raising page as we know so many of you wanted the opportunity to feel as though you could do something to help us - we hope this gives you that "something", as it will certainly give us a small distraction over the next few weeks.

If you want to read more about Sands and the (fairly shocking) statistics surrounding stillbirth, you may find the link below useful.

http://www.why17.org/Why17-Home.html