Laura Tobin on bringing her premature baby home: 'We took turns checking her hourly'

Good Morning Britain weather presenter Laura Tobin has described her baby arriving prematurely as her 'biggest downpour moment', but says the hardest part was bringing her little girl Charlotte home from the hospital.

She said she used to spend all day every day at the hospital after the birth of her daughter at 27 weeks because she felt she 'just had to be helpful', keeping a factual diary of what was happening and a schedule for pumping breastmilk.

Speaking to Kate Thornton on White Wine Question Time, she said: "The thing that was probably the hardest to weather was coming home, not having machines to tell you that your baby's alive is really hard.

"Most parents come home, and they know that their baby is alive, because they can see it. But if you've only had a machine tell you that, it's really difficult to trust that they're alive.

"So we used to take turns and shifts, just checking every hour she was breathing through the night."

WATCH: Laura Tobin on going into premature labour at Good Morning Britain

Tobin, who joined ITV's Daybreak in 2012 before moving to Good Morning Britain, said she still tried to stay 'as bright and positive as possible' and has spoken about how the show's Dr Hilary Jones helped keep her calm when she went into labour on the set.

Because of baby Charlotte, now four, being premature, the couple limited the number of people who could hug her during the first two years of her life - saying they 'basically lived the lockdown that everyone has just lived but for two years' before going almost straight into national lockdown.

Anyone who came to visit had to be '100% well' and would go straight to the bathroom to wash their hands on arriving, before using anti-bacterial gel.

Tobin said: "We were kind of like crazy, 'anti-bac' people. Only my parents, my husband's parents and grandmas were allowed to hug [Charlotte] and we had a blanket that they would wear to hug her. And no one else was allowed to hug her or touch her.

"We didn't have any more than six people in the house at a time because we were really worried about germs and we wouldn't go out, we would just go for walks in fresh air.

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"I never went to a baby class. I never went to the soft play. I didn't really have playdates. It was probably harder coming out of hospital than being in the hospital."

But she said the time had helped her family have time for just them, even though Charlotte did end up having to return to hospital a few times, which Tobin blamed on 'taking that one risk that time' and going to a cafe, saying: "We'll never do that again."

"It was a nice thing that it wasn't all of these other people wanting to come and hug us. So we have a really nice a bond and much closer bond, the three of us, than we would have done," she said.

Having had a two year assessment for her daughter, Tobin and her husband were told by doctors that they could branch out a bit more and do more things.

"Then six months later, we went into a bloody lockdown," Tobin told Thornton. "And we went back into lockdown mode and cleaning mode and not seeing people mode.

"So for us it was so easy to slip back into that. And it wasn't stressful at all because we just went back into the life that we knew."

WATCH: Laura Tobin on climate change, being competitive and getting her daughter interested in science