Toddler has been going through $SOMETHING recently – probably teething, maybe an earache, definitely a bit of a chesty cough, definitely farty gas – and last night I crashed in her room (we both do this, on a shift rota) and there was incessant toddler discomfort leading to the small squawking child, well, squawking.

I didn’t sleep from ~7pm until 6am when I was relieved of duty, and… I was wrecked. On top of my head cold and chest infection (critics are amazed! now in it’s fifth month!) I basically set up a duvet coccoon and stayed there until 9:30am and slept and groaned, and then had breakfast and returned to sleep and groan some more.

A neighbour rang the bell around 11:30 to ask my help having locked themselves out of their home, so I set them up with a large shim made from a plastic milk bottle, and then returned to the coccoon, finally emerging to attack the laundry around 4pm.

Parenting: I could not have described the exhaustion before experiencing it. I could not have conceived this. 24-hour sponsored birdwatches, three-day non-stop hackathons, back-to-back longhaul flights, none of that compares.

Still wouldn’t trade it, but this massively underscores the importance of selfcare.