I read in a baby magazine this week that a recent survey of Mums found that 37% of us sometimes feel like a complete failure as a mother. That can’t be true I thought. Only 37%?!

I had two total failure incidents this week alone. I hardly dare write them down actually. My heart rate is skyrocketing just remembering them.

First, was the running out of nappies when Lauren had diarrhoea and I was in a hospital waiting room for several hours incident. You don’t need many more details than that other than I tried in vain to get a nappy from a grandmother who had a baby with her (she claimed she only had one but I am sure she was lying grrr), then from the receptionist who was totally unhelpful in a very monosyllabic way. I failed. So final option involved scraping mess out of nappy as best I could then putting it back on her (sob). It was a definite low point, especially as she then smelt of dirty nappies for the next 3 hours. Poor baby.

Secondly we had the massacre scene when Lauren crawled up into the shower base and cut her thumb on my razor. I didn’t notice as she didn’t make a peep and was crawling merrily round the floor. I looked down to see her doing blood paintings on the bathroom tiles. By this time she’d wiped her face and clothes with blood and I couldn’t even see where the cut was. When I eventually found it ,the next thing was trying to stem the flow. She didn’t want to hold her hand up or have pressure on it. I managed eventually with two plasters, which blood was seeping through and Lauren was sucking. Yeeeugh.

So to balance the scales and take the ‘total’ out of ‘total failure’ I decided to take Lauren for a lovely day out to the Natural History Museum. Pointing is still very much in vogue with her and the dinosaur skeletons were getting a lot of finger action. The big T-Rex was of course a highlight too, with lots of ooooos and oo oooos as we walked past it.

It is lovely seeing how excited all the children are in the museum and great that museums can still inspire so much wonder in our multimedia age. Although it has to be said that some of the less exciting exhibits were looking quite quiet and dusty. The mollusc department for example was looking very sad. What they should obviously do is move those molluscs to the whale room and do a ‘Snail and the Whale’ exhibit. You can have that idea curators!

We also did the blue whale room and here she is in failing to pose nicely. We stood by the entrance for a while just staring at the animal models. I think literally every single person who comes in to that room says ‘so’ and ‘big’ at some point within the first 3 seconds.

By the way, isn’t the top she’s wearing gorgeous? It’s Trotters obviously. There’s a pink version too and with jeans it is a particularly nice practical but pretty option for a day about down. Lots of people said she looked very pretty when we were out! She would have looked even prettier if she’d kept her bow in her hair for more than 3 seconds at a time. I used to be able to trick her by putting it on while she’s asleep but she has now got wise to this. Dammit!

So anyway, I say, Mums, we are all failures sometimes but so what?! Let’s face it, you’ve got at least the first 5 years to make mistakes because they’ll never remember anyway. I’ll tell Lauren tales of her perfect upbringing when she’s older and she’ll have no memories of sitting in dirty nappies to contradict me with(and she’ll never get to read this blog!)