HOW MUCH???

Children are cute. Not in the “cootchy cootchy coo” sense of the word, but I mean they’re savvy. From an early age too.

Take Annabel for instance.

She saw Joseph having a piece of chewing gum at the weekend (don’t panic, it was sugar free AND a treat) and she asked for some.

She knew she was going to be told “no” and, after I had told her exactly that, she replied, “I not a baby, I big. I can have some please?”

Bottom line – she didn’t get any.

Cut to this morning and Joseph crashes down the landing, alerting her to the fact that he is awake and so she too poodles into our room. As she comes round the door, I realise that her monitor alarm will sound as she is no longer lying on the sensor pad, so I ask her to please go and close the monitor.

Her shoulders drop, she turns and walks out of the room grumbling that “my only little. My don’t close the monitor”.

I love the fact that they’re as old as they say they are at that precise moment.

“I’m little. I’m big. I’m whatever I want to be when I want to be!”

Ooh, talking of monitor’s, I must recommend the Maws Reassurance Baby Monitor. We bought ours when Joseph was born and it is just now starting to become a bit temperamental. The best thing about this monitor is the sensor pad that slides underneath your baby’s mattress and it picks up the movement of their tiny chests moving as they breathe. If at any point it does not sense movement for 20 seconds or more, an alarm sounds alerting you to the fact that something is wrong.

It’s exactly the same thing as they had in the neo-natal unit where Joseph spent his first couple of weeks and we bought one there and then.

It put up with being jumped on as he got older and began exploring his cot and has survived the same abuse from Annabel.

5 and a half years – I think that’s pretty good going myself. Although it was a £100 when we bought it, I think it saved us a lot of running up and down stairs in the early days.

And to be honest, it is becoming a bit of a liability as Annabel insists on coming into our room in the middle of the night to ask to go to the toilet but the first thing we know of it is when her monitor goes off in our room, swing into action and nearly knock her over in the process.

Which reminds me. We have had a plasterer in this past weekend and so I emptied our room and we have been sleeping on our mattress on Joseph’s floor at the foot of his bed (which he has found hilarious).

Apparently, M heard Annabel crying in the night on Sunday and she ran along the landing to her room; she wasn’t there. She ran back along the landing to the bathroom to see if she had gone straight to the loo but no, not there either.

She finally ran into our room to find Annabel, standing in the middle of an empty room with dark brown walls and with strange, eerie streetlights shining through the condensation running down every window

That must have been pretty horrible. She must have wondered where the hell we had gone!

Or perhaps she was screaming at the delightful wallpaper we had uncovered when tearing down a wall!

Perhaps.