Hannah Miley’s daughter Nula sits next to her mum and waves her arms in the air like she’s disco dancing. Or doing the 100m front crawl? “Everybody always asks, does she get in the pool, is she swimming?” says Hannah, a three-time Olympic finalist, world and European champion and easily the greatest athlete to come out of Inverurie. “But will she be a swimmer? I’ll leave that completely up to her.
” For now, Nula, who turned one last month, is content with playtime on the living room floor, wriggling around and emanating exactly the kind of beaming grin that earned her mum the nickname Smiley Miley during her 17-year swimming career. “At the minute, she’s got this thing we call an E.T.
finger,” says Hannah, mimicking the signature hand gesture from the Steven Spielberg movie. “It just literally goes around picking at everything.” Nula also jumped headfirst into Halloween, dressing up as the world’s most adorable pumpkin and only held back from trick or treating because of an untimely bout of hand, foot and mouth.
All very normal for a toddler celebrating her second Halloween. And so very different from her first..
. A traumatic birth for baby Nula Nula was born at Aberdeen Maternity Hospital on October 30, . She was unresponsive, meaning she wasn’t breathing, and Hannah remembers the terrifying silence in the maternity ward as staff used a hand pump to keep Nula supplied with oxygen.
“I didn’t really know what was happening, but I just knew I cou.