Owing to an increased workload BB has spent her first full day at nursery. Sending her there for an entire day is something I had thus far managed to avoid thanks to a combination of both grannies and a series of morning sessions instead. But last week there was no getting away from it: we were parted for eight hours. Twice.

It’s not that separation anxiety was the reason for half day sessions only, it was more a case of bedroom anxiety. With BB still in need of a nap in the afternoon, the idea of her ‘key worker’ putting her down in one of a line of cots as other tots wail and whimper themselves to sleep fills me with a dread I would rather avoid. Even if it means starting my work when Misery Guts arrives home from his and finishing at silly o’clock, or working at the weekend instead.

And it’s not that BB’s nursery is bad in the bed stakes (perhaps it just so happened that on the day I viewed it there was a rare spell of wailing and whimpering) but even so, I’d rather she slept at home and pity any parent who has no choice.

So it was me who couldn’t sleep the night before her first full day, fretting about the rights and wrongs of the nursery environment and whether my instructions to put her down only if she was on the verge of a coma was really in her best interests.

Of course she had a whale of a time. In fact there wasn’t time to sleep: sandpits sessions in the morning, Spanish lessons (I kid you not) in the afternoon. She almost looked disappointed when I arrived to collect her at the end of the day.

Who needs a mummy, anyway?