So, I was driving Miss O home after a rather uneventful day involving a pootle around the shops and a trip to the library.

It was pouring with rain, but we were in high spirits given that we’d seen not one, but TWO yellow cars, and an excellent variety of doggies, including a Dalmatian (which, if you’re as big a fan of Marshall from Paw Patrol as she is, is akin to clocking Taylor Swift sashaying down your local high street…)

After a minute or so of silence, I caught a glimpse of her in my mirror. She was absolutely beaming in my direction.

“Mummy?”

“Yes baby?”

“I am SO happy!”

… I’m not going to lie, I welled up a bit.

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I spend an inordinate amount of time feeling guilty about how much ‘quality time’ we spend together. Weekdays are often a blurry race to the finish line filled with pick-ups and drop-offs and deadlines and “crap is that TOMORROW?” and rattling through a bath-book-bed routine peppered with “but WHY??” and “don’t like it!” and “5 more minutes!”

Weekends are better, but seem to get swallowed up by weekly shops and household jobs and all manner of mundane tasks. Of course there have been trips to the farm, toddles around the beach, that time in CBeebies Land when she nearly bankrupted us in the gift shop…but more often than not it’s a trip to the park, a gander round the free zoo (nobody actually BUYS things from ‘Pets at Home’ do they?