I believe some people have children that sleep through the night from the moment they are born. I was never one of those people. I was one of those other ones; the crazy parents enacting every piece of advice the second after they had received it. Night lights, nappy changes, baby slings, sleeping together, book readings, warm baths and bottles of catnip tea—gotcha! Singing, burping, rocking, swinging, swaying, hushing, cooing, praying—onto it! I don’t know what my neighbours made of those long-impassioned prayers but perhaps that explains why they sold up and moved to Queensland.

Back in those dizzy, sleep-deprived days and nights, I would have done anything—ANYTHING—to get some sleep. If someone had suggested building a yurt in my backyard and wrapping my baby in yak-skin would guarantee me three measly hours, I would have snapped it together before you could even say Bunnings. But if someone had been silly enough to suggest to me that someday this pain would be useful to me, I would have bopped them a whopper on the nose. But then, you know, the tiredness faded, the memories became tinted and gilt-edged and before long I started to laugh. And next thing, I began to wonder how children made sense of all the crazy fuss their parents get up to when a new baby comes home and almost before I knew it, I had a given birth to a new book. Unlike my first three boys, I am delighted to report that this book baby required very little bouncing to sleep on my mini trampoline.