“Mylee was mischievous, full of energy, full of life. Her big brother’s best friend,” says Perth mother Melanie.
“Walking, talking, running really, running everywhere. Climbing on everything. She loved pulling apart my folding laundry.”
15-month-old Mylee Manning was a bright, beautiful strawberry blonde toddler, the centre of her family’s world.
Listening to her mother, Melanie, describe how that world came crumbling down on 29th June 2012 is difficult. Her voice breaks with grief, four years on.
“It was a normal day, a normal night,” said Melanie.
“Mylee had not had any major health concerns, nothing severe or to give us any indication anything was wrong.”
She was put to bed, “gave a big smile to her dad" and went to sleep.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a normal night. A night like any other. A night like all of us have had with our children.
But the next morning when Melanie went to get her, she says as soon as she touched the door she “knew something was wrong”.
A “strange feeling” came over her.
She opened the door. Everything was still.
“You know that saying, deathly quiet, it was like that," said Melanie.
“I knew instantly she was gone.”
They immediately did CPR, trying to revive her, paramedics were there in minutes, but she was gone and there was no hope of her coming back.
Melanie and Sean Manning - parents to Chase, who is now seven, Mylee who would have been five, Paisley, two, and one-year-old Eden - never considered that a toddler could die of SIDS.
They never imagined Mylee was ever in any danger, she was well past the SIDS stage.