Being a mother involves serious will power sometimes. No sooner have the kids polished off the mountain of selection boxes they got at Christmas than you’re hit with a dieter’s worst nightmare: Easter. It’s admittedly my own fault that I chose now to try and lose a few pounds, when there’s so much chocolate in the fridge I feel like I’m having an affair with Willy Wonka. But, when you’ve got three kids and dozens of relatives, the sheer number of eggs they receive is insane.

When I was a child, nobody had ever heard of a global resistance to anti-biotics. If you were sick, your mum whipped you off to the doctors for some ice-cream flavoured penicillin, before heading home to catch the rest of Knots Landing. These days it isn’t like that and rightly so. The words, ‘it’s a virus,’ translate as go home, take Paracetamol and don’t come back unless you have to crawl in like a character from Reservoir Dogs that’s just been shot. With this in mind, I kn

Toddlers: Cute but deadly (embarrassing) Social media has been obsessed by toddlers throwing tantrums lately. The discussion seems to have been ignited by that woman who got chucked out of John Lewis a couple of weeks ago, because her two-year-old threw the kind of wobbler that two-year-olds are good at. You know, the nuclear meltdowns that nothing on earth could stop. Anyone would think that it’s news that children are experts at embarrassing their parents. Much as we love t

Regular readers of this column will know I have a love-hate relationship with parenting techniques. Largely because I’ve tried them all – everything from sticker charts to naughty steps – and on occasions had about as much success as Norway’s Eurovision record. But when something works, I feel duty bound to share the secret. Not because I’m smug, or feel any more qualified to give tips on this stuff than I do to teach synchronised swimming. But because I know in my bones that

How my ten year old's bedroom DOESN'T look (above) Kids aren’t particularly tidy creatures in my experience. My three boys have an exceptional talent for walking into a spotless living room and making it look as though it’s been stampeded by a herd of wildebeest within minutes. But it’s their bedrooms that are in a league of their own, at least when they’re left to their own devices. Which leaves a conundrum for parents as our kids grow up. When they’re really little, it’s in