I hate to say this about my beautiful, funny, bright three year old daughter, but (whisper it) sometimes I find her enormously irritating. Sometimes I even find the Gingerbread Man (14 months today!) really annoying too. Just because they are being small people and doing small people things and making small people noise and mess and fuss.

I feel bad about this. Before DS was born, I was endlessly patient with DD. She could do no wrong, and actually, she was such a ‘good’ girl anyway, it was pretty easy. Then DS comes along with all his noise and reflux and not sleeping and being A Boy generally, and my head, eyes and arms need to be in two places at once, dealing with two different people who are utterly dependent on me but in completely different ways, at the same time. Having a second child, for me, was the exact situation that the expression ‘head f**k’ was invented for.

So now, much more frequently than I would like, I am shouty, impatient mummy. DD calls me a snappy crocodile. At bedtime last night, after a random, one-year-after-potty-training

pants pissing incident at her best friend’s house (who then did the same – it’s a conspiracy!) she told me ‘I love you, mummy, but I didn’t like you today’. Well, fair enough my darling, because frankly, I really don’t like myself when I get in a mummy rage. She asks to see my face sometimes, to judge what mood I am in, because things can swing from absolutely fine and fun to not so nice in milliseconds.

DH says she just knows how to push my buttons. I hope to God she hasn’t inherited his perverse, winding up sense of humour and this is just her Being A Threenager. I am growing terrified that I am somehow damaging her by not being lovely all the time. I am starting to dread her being an actual teenager because if I can’t manage a pre-schooler with patience, humour, love and respect, then how on earth am I going to deal with a 13 year old girl? And goodness only knows what sort of tantrums DS is going to start pulling soon, given the range his tiny toddling self gets into when he loses his current fixation object, an empty bubble pot and wand (Bah-boo! BAH-BOO!).

In an effort to chillax, I keep picking affirmation cards from Louise L Hay’s wonderful Power Thought Card deck. Today it is ‘I am flexible and flowing’. We’ll see if keeping that in mind helps me with overtired nippers towards bathtime tonight…