It is World Book Day next week. Take it from me, that reminder could be the greatest favour anyone’s done for you for the last month. I have personal experience of forgetting this key date in the school calendar and it’s one of those moments that will haunt me until I’m old, grey and hopefully in one of those nice nursing homes with an in-house yoga teacher. It was five years ago. I can’t pretend hadn’t been warned: The instruction to dress up your child as a character from a

I’m now convinced I did something wrong in the first months of my maternity leave: I obsessed too much about doing stuff right. I stayed at home sterilising everything in sight, packed a nappy bag to go to Tesco like I was preparing to tour Brazil and - courtesy of The Contented Little Baby Book - lived by the clock, terrified that if I didn’t have the baby swaddled and in a dark room by 9.15am he was destined for a life of dysfunction and chaos. Ten years and two more babies

With February half term coming up, I am yet again cursing the fact that I didn’t have both the foresight and funds to whisk us all away from the rain and cold to somewhere sunny. Instead, I’ll be left scratching round for ideas to entertain the kids, when the sky looks like the dawn of the apocalypse. The best I could come up with this weekend was to go swimming. Though even I couldn’t pretend that our local leisure centre is much substitute for Tenerife; the closest thing to

Before you have a child, you have a vague set of ideas about the type of parent you’ll be. In my case, this was shattered soon after the birth of my first baby - on the day I waved the white flag on introducing a ‘routine’, stocked up on dummies and, by the time he was a toddler, gave up on the purple broccoli and chickpea bakes and bought some chicken nuggets. I regret none of these things: after all, I’ve got three happy, healthy children, none of whom seem to have suffered