Mums with OCD have visions of stabbing, drowning or suffocating the baby repeatedly throughout the day. Along with fears of contamination or rigid ideas about feeding or bathing, these images pop into their minds over and over. A mum might pick up a knife to cut broccoli and think, “What if I . . . ”

Merrill Sparago, a psychiatrist who specialises in helping women both during pregnancy and post-natally, says that almost all new mums have bizarre thoughts, but for mums with OCD they are repeated and intrusive. After a while, the mum begins to doubt herself, worrying that if she’s thinking this way she might actually be capable of following through.

Mums with postnatal OCD hide the kitchen knives, or avoid the baby as much as possible, fearing that they might act on a disturbing thought. But according to Sparago, these mums are not dangerous. Postnatal psychosis — a separate disorder in which a mum loses touch with reality and her aggressive thoughts seem logical to her — requires immediate medical attention. This was the diagnosis in the famous case of Andrea Yates, who drowned her children in the bathtub because she believed she was saving them from evil.

In contrast to this, the very fact that a woman with OCD is bothered by her thoughts and wants them to go away means she’s no more likely to hurt her baby than any other mum.

James Swain, a scientist at the University of Michigan, says that a new parent’s brain is wired for anxiety. He argues that having a certain level of this post-natal emotion is evolutionarily adaptive — it has helped us keep our babies out of harm’s way for thousands of years. Swain and other researchers at Yale found that, even for a ‘normal’ parent, the sound of a crying baby triggered brain regions associated with anxiety and OCD. The problem with the full-blown disorder is that a woman becomes stuck in thought patterns that are no longer adaptive and disturbing thoughts or fears become caught in the obsessive-compulsive machinery.

Not surprisingly, a mum with OCD is likely to keep her thoughts to herself, fearing that the rest of the world, or even her partner, might think she is crazy. Sparago stresses that the correct diagnosis is key (distinguishing OCD from post partum depression or psychosis), because the treatment that follows will be tailored to the mum’s needs. Along with medication, cognitive behavioural therapy helps mums slowly approach their fears. The key is to separate the obsessions from a mum’s self-concept. “It takes a long time to convince a mum with OCD that she’s not crazy,” says Sparago, “and to accept that her thoughts are the fault of the disease — she is not a bad person.”

If you think you might need support during your pregnancy or postpartum, help and information is available through Post Partum Support International.

Our little “worm,” as my husband, Brian, calls her, craned her neck to absorb the scenes. Women and children kissed her cheeks and hands in the market. And like the mysterious Islamic call to prayer sounding overhead, we experienced something spiritual — sharing our passion for travel with our infant daughter. By the end of her first year, we had hit Morocco, England (twice), and Cameroon.

But despite our excitement over our baby’s adventures, we caught grief from friends and family about dragging our infant around the world.

Before parenthood, we globe-trotted without a care. Our passports grew thick with hundreds of stamps from work and leisure travel and a two-year stint in Moscow, where I became pregnant. With the news of the pregnancy, the warnings from our seasoned-parent friends became louder.

“You’ll see,” our friends said. “Once you have a kid, life will change, and you won’t travel anymore.”

The excuses ranged from financial constraints and travel-related illnesses, to disrupting sleep schedules and the inconveniences of air travel. Gripped by their kid-fears, most parents we knew let their children dictate their lives. Rather than grounding us, our daughter’s birth fuelled our sense of adventure. Of course having a baby meant tweaking our lifestyle a bit, but most of the changes we made accommodated our desire to see the world, not her schedule.

In January, and with Eloise walking and talking, we accepted another overseas assignment, and our family moved to Douala, Cameroon. Visions of the three of us criss-crossing the continent in a safari jeep made me giddy with excitement. For a few months, our move to West Africa fit neatly into our plan of raising a little citizen of the world.

Our two-year-old recited her ABCs and counted to ten in both English and French. She knew the difference between a water buffalo and a cow. And she understood that the world is larger than “Birginia,” where she was born, or “Norf Carwina,” and “New Orweans,” where her grandparents live.

Our big world shrank to pretty small this spring, however, when we hit some turbulence. The only bug we had hoped she would catch was the travel bug. So when our Cameroonian doctor stood in our bedroom and told us that Eloise had malaria, tears welled in my eyes and self-loathing thoughts ran rampant through my mind.

That first night, her fever reached 104 degrees, and in those moments that she lay writhing and moaning in my arms, I questioned every decision we had made up until that point. Maybe our friends and family were right. Maybe we shouldn’t take all these risks with our daughter and just live a “normal” life, in which Disney World tops our travel wish list.

Upon hearing the news, all of our seasoned-parent friends and family responded with the same shock: “Malaria!” The naysayers were vindicated.

But after three days of mixing a green liquid medicine into her chocolate milk and bribing her with cookies to drink it, our little worm wriggled her way back onto her trampoline — malaria free. Along with her declining fever, those moments of doubts about our unconventional lifestyle faded. We understood well what could have happened, but our family had no room for kid-fears in our suitcases. Armed with our antimalarial pills, mosquito nets and bug repellent, we started planning for our next big trip to see the mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

Hiking three hours through the rainforest to see Dian Fossey’s gorillas poses many problems for a toddler. (We have limits.) So we did something our friends back home would have done. We hired a baby sitter. We found her through the American Embassy in Kigali, and the next day, Brian and I trekked up to the gorillas and back again, reuniting with Eloise at the lodge by 3 p.m.

Eloise missed the big furry beasts, but they probably would have freaked her out anyway. Instead, she rode with us through the countryside, with children waving and running along side the car. She saw kids, not much older than she, playing and working on farms. She heard different languages and learned how to say a new word, “Rahwunda.”

This time, I posted pictures of our travels on Facebook. Some of the images showed Eloise posing with a plaster gorilla family back at the lodge, and others showed Brian and I less than six feet from an actual silverback. As I expected, the comments rushed in. But this time, they took a different tone.

“Amazing,” and “sooo cool,” appeared in multiple posts from those who typically knocked our decision to show Eloise the world. Finally, it seemed, we agreed on something. The trip was “awesome,” as one friend wrote, but having our little worm along for the ride made it more so — spiritual even.

I expect when Eloise grows up, she might not remember vividly the mountains of Rwanda. She may have forgotten how to speak French, and for sure, she will only know the Moroccan kisses as a classic family story told to her throughout the years. But if she has a choice between travelling to Disney Land or Dakar, I hope she senses that same mysterious calling we felt that first year in Fez and lets passion, not fear, guide her through her life.

All photographs by Jamie and Brian Rich

1. You’re working on a project when you hear your child crying in another room where you know they are being supervised by a responsible adult. You:

A. drop what you’re doing to check in and make sure the situation is addressed before it gets worse
B. wait to see if the cries turn into wails before taking a peek
C. let the adult who is supervising handle it – you’ll only get involved if there is blood

2. The office Xmas party is scheduled for the same day as your kid’s school play. You:

A. go to the party and make sure someone who loves your child is in the audience, armed with a video camera so that you can watch it later with your child
B. happily go to your kid’s show because you hate those office parties anyway – now you have a good excuse
C. try to make it to both events, missing substantial portions of each, but successfully showing your face for a period of time

3. It’s 4:30 p.m. and you have an important deadline in the morning. You have at least four more hours of work to complete the project. You:

A. stop working at 5:00 p.m., spend time with the family and then, once the kids are in bed, work until 1:00 a.m.
B. call and ask for an extension until tomorrow afternoon
C. work past 5:00 p.m. and through dinner because you can’t relax with the project hanging over your head

4. Which of the following work projects is most appealing to you?

A. a longer-term project for which you are solely responsible
B. a group effort that requires consensus and the bringing together of work and ideas
C. a combination of both individual and team efforts

5. How do you like to communicate most with others?

A. in person
B. telephone
C. email

6. A large but important project is coming soon, but has yet to be assigned. You:

A. raise your hand to lead it; you always like a challenge
B. offer to help if needed
C. make yourself invisible

7. You get an email from a colleague that is written entirely in capital letters. You:

A.wonder why he is “yelling” at you and spend the rest of the day thinking about what you could have possibly done wrong
B. reply back to him in caps asking, “WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME?”
C. pick up the phone and call him to straighten it out person to person

8. It’s been a few days since you last heard from your boss. You view this as:

A. a welcome rest; you take it when you can get it
B. a sign you are about to get canned; you begin to update your CV
C. an uncomfortable pause; you call your boss to check in and see what’s happening.

9. During work hours, the phone rings and you see it is your closest friend from uni. You:

A. anxiously pick up the phone and talk for the next 30 minutes
B. pick it up and ask if you can call him or her back when you’ve finished work
C. let the call go to voicemail and make a note to call back later in the evening

10. Which is more important to you during the day?

A. a change of scenery
B. a change of pace
C. I don’t like change

11. Which area do you question yourself the most?

A. my abilities as a professional
B. my abilities as a parent
C. both parent and professional equally

For each of the following statements, select how often each applies to you: (always, sometimes, never)

12. I have a hard time focusing on projects until the deadline is upon me.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

13. I work best under pressure.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

14. Praise for a job well done is important to me.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

15. I like to multi-task.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

16. I have a hard time ignoring housework that’s piling up.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

17. When working on a project, I value the input of others.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

18. I enjoy working in my profession.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

19. I enjoy socialising with colleagues from work.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

20. I feel guilty that I don’t spend enough time with my family.

A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never

Now tot up your score…

Question 1: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 2: A = 1 point; B = 5 points; C = 3 points
Question 3: A = 3 points; B = 5 points; C = 1 point
Question 4: A = 1 point; B = 5 points; C = 3 points
Question 5: A = 1 point; B = 3 points; C = 5 points
Question 6: A = 1 point; B = 3 points; C = 5 points
Question 7: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 8: A = 3 points; B = 5 points; C = 1 point
Question 9: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 10: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 11: A = 1 point; B = 5 points; C = 3 points
Question 12: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 13: A = 1 point; B = 3 points; C = 5 points
Question 14: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 15: A = 1 point; B = 3 points; C = 5 points
Question 16: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 17: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 18: A = 1 point; B = 3 points; C = 5 points
Question 19: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point
Question 20: A = 5 points; B = 3 points; C = 1 point

So – how did you go?

Between 75-100 — Working from home is a possibility for everyone but you may need to make some significant adjustments make it work. The most difficult aspects of working from home for you will most likely be staying focused on the task at hand, especially when no one is watching you. Carving out private physical space away from the noise of your family and establishing your own practices to stay in touch and on time with work will be tremendously helpful. Set deadlines and keep them. Arrange for the kids to be out of earshot while you’re working, if at all possible. And make it a habit to connect with someone from work everyday to discuss what you are doing. All of these may not come naturally, but if you stick to them, you can establish the right environment to thrive.

Between 46-74 — You seem to have an equal balance of commitment to your family and your profession which bodes extremely well for working from home. You realise that there is tremendous give and take between the two competing priorities. Chances are you will be very successful in your home office but that doesn’t mean you won’t ever feel guilty about coming up short on either end of the spectrum. Guilt is a given, no matter how smooth you are. Communication with both parties (family and work) is critical to avoid major conflicts. Don’t beat yourself up for playing hooky from work for an hour or two to run an errand, as long as you make it up somewhere along the way and don’t miss deadlines. And when your child complains that you are in your office too much, tell yourself that the alternative of NOT being there is much worse.

Between 20-45 — You have a great deal of professional drive which can be a very positive thing when working from home. However, your biggest challenge will be that you can never “leave the office” and you might find yourself working too hard to at the expense of your family. This work ethic is indeed important, particularly at the beginning of a work from home arrangement, so that your colleagues know you are serious about your job. But once you prove yourself, you can relax a bit. When the phone is ringing after hours, you don’t always have to pick it up. And during work hours, try not to be chained to your desk. Give yourself a break, stand up, stretch your legs and hang out with your kids for 10 minutes in the middle of the day. Homework does have benefits which you are permitted to reap and still do a great job, you know!

For years, experts have said that the key to jump-starting that development was exposure to tonnes of language. But the most important lesson from the newest science is this: the central role of the parent is not to push massive amounts of language into the baby’s ears. Rather, the central role of the parent is to notice what’s coming from the baby, and to respond accordingly.

With that in mind, here are just a few of the hottest tips from scientists who study how babies learn language. Throw out your Baby DVDs and your verbal pedometers, don’t obsess about baby signing – and get informed.

1. Let The Baby Drive The Conversation

Language learning begins before infants produce a syllable or understand a single word. At this point, it’s about learning – that there is this magical thing called communication. If the baby coos, and the daddy responds: “Is that so?”, then the baby will babble again. So the daddy replies: “Well, we’ll have to ask Mum!”

Through this call-and-response pattern, the baby’s brain learns that the sounds coming out of his mouth affect his parents and get their attention – that voicing is important, not meaningless.

Most parents intuit this turn-taking spontaneously, but they don’t all do it equally well. A remarkable study found when four-month-old infants and parents had better verbal turn-taking, that predicted greater cognitive ability when the children were two years old.

2. Recognise The Stages Of Babble

No less than 80 muscles control the vocal tract, and it can take a year or more to gain control of it. So while babble might sound like gibberish, it’s actually a progression of overlapping stages, as the child learns to master sound production and muscle control.

From birth, children make quasi-resonant vowel sounds. They use the back of the vocal tract with a closed throat and little breath support. At this point, kids may sound like they are fussing when they aren’t; they could just be experimenting with their throat muscles.

At around five months, a baby has enough control to open her throat and push breath through to occasionally produce fully resonant vowels. Soon the baby is adding marginal syllables, consonant-vowel transitions. Rather than “goo” and “coo,” more like “ba” and “da,” using the articulators in the front of the mouth. This is why so many of a baby’s first words start with “b” and “d”: they’re the first proper consonants the muscles can make. However, since the baby still can’t get his tongue, teeth and upper cleft out of the way fast enough, the vowel sounds are distorted.

As early as six months, but typically around nine months, infants start producing some canonical syllables, the basic sound-units of adult speech. The consonant-vowel transition is fast, and the breath is quick. The child is almost ready to combine syllables into words.

3. High-Response Rate To Mature Babble

New York University’s Dr. Catherine Tamis LeMonda found that when mothers respond more frequently to their babies, the children acquire language much more quickly. During the peak hour of the day, a high-responding mum might respond to over 80% of the baby’s vocalisations – up to 200 times per hour – while low-responding mums respond about half the time.

In studies, toddlers of high-responders are a whopping six months ahead of the toddlers of low-responders. They said their first word at ten months and, by 14 months, had 50 words in their spoken vocabulary.

But the trick is not to overdo it: don’t respond to every babble. As the baby progresses through the various babble stages, the focus should be on affirming the baby’s more mature vocalisations, gradually responding less to immature sounds. In that way, the baby learns which sounds were more effective, and thus the ones he should keep making.

4. Baby Talk May Sound Silly But It’s Really Good For Babies

Baby Talk: We’ve all done it – that oddly sing-song, slow, giddy cadence that people suddenly use when speaking to children. There’s actually a lot of research on baby talk – the scientific expression for it is parentese. Its patterns and cadence are so universal that scholars can play a recording of someone speaking in a language you’ve never heard before, and you’ll still know if the person was talking to a baby.

Some parents are dead against baby talk; instead, they want kids to hear adults speak normally. But that’s the wrong approach. Parentese’s exaggerated qualities help children’s brains discern discrete sounds. By elongating vowels and stressing transitions more clearly, parentese helps a baby brain’s auditory cortex recognise vowel-consonants groupings. And some use of it helps until a child’s second birthday.

5. Show Them Your Lips

Perhaps it’s an excuse to buy a fab new red lipstick, but babies learn language by lip-reading.

Before they comprehend any words, they first have to discern when one word ends and another begins. This is called segmentation and babies learn this partly by watching how people move their lips and mouths to produce sounds. At seven and a half months, babies can segment the speech of people – but only if they see the mouth of the person who’s speaking. (Even for adults, seeing someone’s lips as she speaks is the equivalent of a 20-decibel increase in volume.)

This is one main reason baby DVDs don’t work – because they don’t show the face of a person as she is speaking. Instead, there’s an audio, and then an unrelated image. The sensory inputs don’t build on each other: they compete.

6. Proper Object Labelling

One of the ways parents help infants is by doing what’s called “object labeling” – telling them, “that’s your stroller,” “see the flower?,” and “look at the moon!” Babies learn better from object labelling when the parent waits for a baby to naturally be gazing, pointing or vocalising about the object. Ideally, the parent isn’t intruding or directing the child’s attention. Instead, he’s following the child’s lead.

But timing is everything: the word has to be heard just as an infant is looking or grabbing after it to make sure that the child connects the word to the right object.

7. Beware Criss-cross Labelling

The danger in overzealous object labelling is that you might inadvertently criss-cross the baby: that is, don’t put words in his mouth that aren’t really there.

Say a baby, holding a spoon, says “buh, buh.” But a mother doesn’t respond to the child’s focus of attention; instead, she responds to the baby’s “buh” sound with a “Bottle? You want your bottle?” Inadvertently, she just criss-crossed the baby: she taught him that a spoon is called “bottle.” While proper object labelling can accelerate word learning, frequently criss-crossed labelling can slow it to a near halt.

8. Use Motionese

When adults talk to young children about small objects, they frequently twist the object, or shake it, or move it around, usually synchronised to the sing-song of parentese. This “motionese” is very helpful in teaching the name of the object. Moving the object helps attract the infant’s attention, turning the moment into a multi-sensory experience.

But the window to use motionese closes at 15 months: by that age, children no longer benefit from the extra motion.

9. Expose Your Child to Multiple Speakers

Researchers at The University of Iowa recently discovered that 14-month-old children failed to learn a novel word if they heard it spoken by a single person, even if the word was repeated many times. The fact that there was a word they were supposed to be learning just didn’t seem to register. Then, instead of having the children listen to the same person speaking many times, they had kids listen to the one word spoken by a variety of different people. The kids immediately learned the word.

Hearing multiple speakers gave the children the opportunity to hear how the phonics were the same, even if the voices varied in pitch and speed. By hearing in the speech what was different, they learned what was the same.

10. Use Frames To Teach New Words

You might think kids need to acquire a certain number of words in their vocabulary before they learn grammar, but it’s the exact opposite. Grammar teaches vocabulary.

A typical two-year old hears roughly 7,000 utterances a day. But 45% of utterances begin with one of these seventeen words: what, that, it, you, are/aren’t, I, do/don’t, is, a, would, can/can’t, where, there, who, come, look, and let’s. Throw in some two and three word combinations, known as frames, and scholars can account for two-thirds of what a toddler hears in a given day.

These word frames are vital frames of reference. When a child hears, “Look at the ___,” he quickly learns that ___ is a new thing to see. Whatever comes after “Don’t” is something he should stop doing – even if he doesn’t yet know the words “touch” or “light socket.”

Without frames, a kid is just trying to plug the few words he recognises into a context where they may or may not belong.

11. Variation Sets

The cousin to frames are “variation sets.” In a variation set, the context and meaning of the sentence remain constant over the course of a series of sentences, but the vocabulary and grammatical structure changes. For instance, a variation set would thus be: “Rachel, bring the book to Daddy. Bring him the book. Give it to Daddy. Thank you, Rachel, you gave Daddy the book.”

In this way, Rachel learns that a “book” is also an “it,” and that another word for Daddy is “him.” That “bring” and “give” both involve moving an object. She heard the past tense of “give,” that it’s possible to switch nouns from being subjects to direct objects (and vice versa), and that verbs can be used as an instruction to act (give it) or description of action taken (she gives).

Variation helps, if it’s used about 50% of the time. More than that, the sentences become too varied: the kids lose the connection between the sentences.

For a more in-depth look into the science behind child language acquisition and many other topics, please check out our book, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Published by Grand Central Publishing, it’ll cost you $35.95 and you can find out more about it here.

Our son was about four months old. Up until that point he had been spending his nights in an Arms’ Reach mini-co-sleeper, a type of three-sided crib designed to attach to the side of our mattress. For four months, it had worked well. Then, one day, we realised he was close to outgrowing the mini and, unfortunately, our bedroom was not large enough to fit a full-sized co-sleeper.

It was at that point that we tried what I well knew parents had been doing all over the world for thousands of years – we put the baby between us. Co-sleeping, I strongly believed, was the most natural thing in the world — our culture one of the few intent on quartering newborns off in a separate nursery for them to sleep (or cry) in isolation from the rest of the family. In other words, I wanted to co-sleep, and my husband was willing to give it a try.

But at some point between, say, two and four a.m., one of us turned on the light and uttered the three words that would eventually be spoken every time thereafter that we attempted what was supposed to be this very natural and nurturing act: “This isn’t working.”

Maybe it was us. Both my husband and I are light sleepers. We toss and turn. We talk in our sleep. We live with a spoiled dog that whimpers and whines if she’s not under the covers, between someone’s feet.

Or maybe it was the baby. He’s big. By the age of four months he’d reached the ninetieth percentile for height and weight. And, like his mama, he snores. Throughout the night he often wakes up and cries for a minute or two, then falls back asleep. Even though he was too young at that point to move himself around much, he consistently and miraculously ended up sleeping horizontally in the center of the mattress, arms and legs splayed, smacking or kicking us in the face, chest, or groin, every ten or so minutes.

It seemed to us we had two choices. We could move to another unit, with a larger bedroom – and buy a Super King-sized mattress, or we could move him into his own cot. We chose the latter. There was no way around it; we were bad co-sleepers.

I probably would have chalked this up as a personal failure, just one of the many reasons no one was going to nominate me for the attachment-parenting mum-of-the-year award. Only after talking to a number of friends who’d had similar experiences did it occur to me that something more might be going on.

It was this suspicion that led me to Eyal Ben-Ari, a professor of anthropology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has observed first-hand how co-sleeping works in Japan, just one of many Eastern countries where it is the rule and not the exception.

In one of several articles on the subject, Ben-Ari describes how among Japanese families, a child sleeps with its mother until the next child is born, and then she or he relocates to sleep with the father or one of the grandparents. It is not unusual for this pattern to continue until the child reaches the age of ten. Such ‘overcrowding’, he explains, is not a function of lack of space, because even when there are enough rooms for all of the family’s members, many families prefer to sleep in the same room. Whereas many Western parents view a child’s sleeping in his own bed as an important milestone on the way towards independence, the Japanese emphasis is on promoting a sense of closeness and security in small children to help them become more confident and capable in the long run.

So what, I wondered, did the Japanese know that I didn’t? Is there something about Western culture that makes us (some of us, anyway) so ill-suited to the practice? According to Ben-Ari, there is. As he sees it, our comfort level with co-sleeping is not something that begins to develop when we become parents, but much earlier, when as babies and children ourselves we learn or intuit the cultural norm for relating to other bodies.

“We all walk around with this assumption that the body ends with the epidermis,” he explains. “But in societies that are much more relational, there’s a stronger link between caretakers and their children. From a very young age, you learn a way of relating to the world that is very much physical. In Japanese culture, they learn from a very young age to relate to other bodies. For example, from what I’ve seen, Western mothers tend to be much more verbal with their children while Japanese mothers tend to be much more physical.”

For someone like myself, he implied, who grew up sleeping in my own bed, in my own room, wiling my way into my parents’ arms after a nightmare or a spotting of that daunting monster in my wardrobe, but generally confined to my own, private, at times, lonely space where there was no tossing and turning, no snoring, no stray elbows and ankles with which to contend, it should be no surprise that trying to get a decent night’s sleep with another tiny (or in my son’s case, not so tiny), body in constant contact with my own would prove challenging.

“Did it prove challenging for you?” I asked the anthropologist. I assumed that he who had devoted himself to the study of Japanese sleep patterns would have practised them with his own family.

“No,” he said. “Because we didn’t try it.” It turns out Ben-Ari grew up with a sleeping arrangement about as far from the one he studied in Japan as one can get. Growing up on a kibbutz in Israel, he not only slept in a separate bed from his parents, he slept under a separate roof in a “children’s house,” the customary practice of the time. For him and his family, such a reversal simply didn’t feel right. Regardless of how engaged he was by the Japanese model, by how well it worked and how deeply ingrained it seemed for the families he studied, when it came to his own family, he says, “we had to do what felt natural to us.”

And as for me and my family, I suppose we’re doing the same, juggling what sounds good with what feels right, hoping for the best as I rock my son and sing to him and wish him the sweetest of dreams, and then close the door between us.

Neighbour Girl lives across the street, and she used to walk into my house every weekend sans invitation, helping herself to my refrigerator and my daughter’s toys. This situation is foreign to me, considering I grew up on a farm. My only neighbour kids were my cousins, and – because we were related and all – my parents had no problem shooing them away like pigeons when they’d outworn their welcome.

I’m a woman who likes privacy. Having small children whom I didn’t name building dams out of my shoe collection unsettles me. Actually, it evokes a visceral reaction not unlike my response to petitioners and mimes. After I left the farm, I lived first in the city where I didn’t know my neighbours, and my neighbours didn’t know me. Even after my daughter came along, we never had other children around. It wasn’t until we arrived in suburbia that we noticed those people who lived in the other houses on the street actually talked. And sometimes (gasp!) crossed our property boundaries with extensions of friendship. I found it quaint and old-timey, the way a neighbourhood should be, as long as I could control the length of the interactions.

When Neighbour Girl’s family first moved in, my husband and I rejoiced. A six-year-old! Across the street from our five-year-old! They’d be best friends and make mud pies and lo, our daughter would be so entertained! It never occurred to us that we would be peeling Neighbour Girl off our home-loving, individualist daughter as she staunchly refused to play dress-up when she’d been happily coloring up until the knock came at the door. Our daughter likes Neighbour Girl a lot, but she doesn’t appreciate being barged in on any more than I do. Therein lies the rub.

The Neighbour Girl situation came to a head one Saturday when I foolishly answered the door at 8 a.m. to find a freckled face staring up at me. “Can I come in and play?” Neighbour Girl asked. My daughter stood behind me on the stairs, hopeful this would mean she didn’t have to clean her room. I looked down at my pyjamas, felt my unwashed hair. I caved, and with that, I lost The Force.

Flustered, I continued to clean the house. But these children! They dragged out every toy! They messed up every room as soon as I moved to clean it! I could feel the corners of my mouth tightening as my voice took on an edge: “DO NOT MESS UP THIS ROOM!” I said in my sternest mummy voice. “CAN’T YOU SEE I?M CLEANING? GO OUTSIDE.”

My husband had gone to get an oil change or this never would have happened. The seventh of eight, he grew up in a town, accompanied by a roving band of pirate children who raided and plundered kitchens until one parent or another would chase them out with a broom. (Maybe I exaggerate, but not much.) When he returned home two hours later to find me shaking in my closet, a bottle of glass cleaner gripped in one hand like a weapon, he was shocked at my frustration.

“Why didn’t you just send her away?” he asked.

“I did! Five times!” I wailed, crumpling in embarrassment.

It’s true. I did send her away.  She would walk across the street to her house, and then ten minutes later the doorbell would ring as she pleaded with my daughter to join her across the street. My girl was having none of it. She wanted to stay in her own house, play with her own toys, and I didn’t blame her. We didn’t ask for an 8 a.m. wake-up call – why should I force my natural hermit out if she wanted Barbie to do Jazzercize in her own bedroom?

Finally, my husband put an end to the madness and firmly sent Neighbour Girl home. He used the same exact words that I did, but she accepted them from him. She left. I cried. Apparently, I thought, I’m not cut out for this suburban stuff after all.

My husband promised to be my partner in Operation Neighbour Girl. We tried various techniques to contain the visits:

Good cop / bad cop:  This timeworn technique works in several ways. First, it rids us of Neighbour Girl for the rest of the day. Second, it keeps my reputation as friendly mummy intact for the occasions on which I have to talk to Neighbour Mummy, who is a delightful person and no doubt unaware that her child roams freely on the days she’s out of the house. Third, it reinforces my husband’s Man Card should we ever need someone to get a football off the roof or rescue a cat from a tree.

Timers: Whether we set the timer for a half-hour or three hours, the timer provides instant, third-party authority. I’d love you to stay another six hours and force me to spend my Saturday dividing up toys, but my goodness, the timer! We certainly can’t argue with a piece of ticking plastic.

The word "hosting":  Neighbour Daddy seems not to notice when Neighbour Girl rambles over, or else he thinks we don’t mind. I mentioned the last time I saw him that we wouldn’t be able to host his daughter before noon on the weekends, as that was when we polished our silver. In our current-day, business-casual world, the mere formality of the word "hosting" strikes fear into most people’s hearts, because God forbid they have to return that sort of favour.

Calling ahead: I mentioned to Neighbour Mummy that it would be good to call ahead in upcoming weekends as we had some dangerous house projects coming up and wouldn’t want the girls to get hurt. Of course, the most dangerous thing we’re doing is planting thyme, but it’s far easier to say, "No, not right now, dear," over the phone than to an upturned, freckled face at your door.

It’s been a few months since that fateful Saturday morning when I found myself questioning the benefit of living without a barbed-wire fence, and I admit, these techniques have worked. The neighbours are good people; they simply didn’t realise the constant visits bothered me. Since then, the knocks at our door have mostly been invitations for our daughter to play at Neighbour Girl’s house, and I’ve made it a point to show up within the hour to tote my girl home under any pretence necessary.

And what do you know – when Neighbour Girl’s visits slowed down, I actually enjoyed them.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “Ruby went through a toy-stealing phase too. I was constantly mortified and explaining to her that it’s wrong, and then one day something clicked and she stopped doing it.” The woman smiles, and says, “How old?” nodding at Ruby. “She’s nine!” I say proudly, “She turned nine in August.” We make some more chit-chat about how the years fly by, then collect our respective charges and leave.

At some point in this conversation I probably should have told her that Ruby is not my kid. But it’s hard to explain. I’m not Ruby’s babysitter. I’m not her nanny or a relative. My title is a strange modern-day one, one that comes with its own ironic punctuation. I’m Ruby’s “aunt” or “auntie.” Don’t forget the quote marks. While “aunt” confers the closeness of a blood tie, the quotes rein it in, making it clear that I’m part of a constructed family, not a biological one.

Ruby’s mother, Marcelle, is my best friend. Nine years ago she dragged me into the bathroom at a party and pulled seven or eight pregnancy tests out of her purse. “I think I’m pregnant,” she said, “and I think I’m keeping it.” Like a true friend, I didn’t point out just how insane it was to be carrying around a bunch of sticks she had peed on (they were in a plastic bag), and we discussed the situation. Ruby’s father was living overseas and unable to be very involved in her life. Marcelle was 35 and had always wanted to have kids. Many of our other friends thought she was making a huge mistake. I knew there was no talking her out of it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Instead I pledged to be a co-parent in any way she needed.

A month or so later, I was holding Marcelle’s hand as we saw Ruby for the first time on the sonogram screen. We both cried. The nurse thought we were a lesbian couple (a misperception that happens to this day), and I went home thinking about how brave my friend was. Like a good partner, I picked up a copy of What to Expect When You Are Expecting, and we were off. On August 30, 2000, we welcomed Ruby Jarrah Aviva Karp into this world. I was “Auntie Mikki” for real. When Marcelle handed me the baby for the first time, I was overwhelmed with fear and excitement. Ruby just blinked up at me, as sure of herself as she always is.

I’m not Ruby’s only “relative.” She has many other “aunts” and “uncles.” As a single mother, Marcelle has been adept at crafting a family out of friends and neighbours. There is Kendrick, who coached Marcelle during the delivery; Josh, who used to live upstairs and provides necessary roughhousing; and our amazing, generous, loving friends Maren and Michael, whose three daughters provide Ruby with all the sibling energy she needs, and who have invited us into their home for every holiday. Maren is the kind of supermum who makes dried apple witches and homemade costumes for Halloween, exposing Ruby to some old school motherly crafting she certainly won’t get from Marcelle or myself.

Being an “auntie” lets me function on both sides of the mother-daughter line. The first time an infant Ruby threw up on me, I felt it was a badge of honour. Now I irritate her every summer by pointing out the spot where she did it, after yelling at her to put her bike away. But I also get enlisted to play pranks on Marcelle at slumber parties.

Now that Ruby has her own phone, I’ve been able to cut out the middleman — or middlemum — and make plans with her all on my own. I like to text her during the day to see what she is up to. Her answers are often short and to the point. “Recess,” she will say. (Sometimes Ruby’s life is more exciting than mine.) She tells me about the other kids at school and what’s going on with her play. Other times we make up stories together on the phone and I play tricks on her, pretending I can see her and describing her outfits. One day she’ll figure out I am talking to her mother while I am texting her.

In truth, I could do more. Marcelle is extraordinarily self-sufficient, and remarkably stubborn about asking for help. Sometimes I’ve had to gently remind her that she doesn’t need to do it all alone, that I am around for the hard stuff as well as the fun stuff. But at the end of the day, I still go home to my life; I am not truly a co-parent.

So, when people ask me if I have kids, I say no. On paper, I’m a textbook spinster — I’m 44, single, with two cats. I’m just an “aunt.” But for me Ruby is much more than my “niece.” She will always be my little girl.

Then my day really began: breakfast to make, nappies to change, dishes to clear, toys to step over, toys to step on. At one point I had sick in my hair and a mixture of sand (residue from yesterday’s trip to the beach) and Froot Loops stuck to my feet. It’s noon, and I’m just now putting those sticky feet up to try to get a little work done to the tune of a foam sword fight. I won’t stop until I fall into bed tonight after the kids are asleep, sipping a glass of wine while I watch repeats of The Golden Girls.

It’s my life, and while it can be exhausting and sometimes frustrating, I love it. I love the noise and the laughter. I love the friendships I see growing between my boys, and the way they dote on their baby sister. I always knew I’d like to have a big family, and though I’m pretty sure we’ve finished at five and I look forward to re-claiming some of my independence, there’s a bit of me that’ll be sad to move on from this stage of my life.

Apparently, that puts me in danger of being a “bumpaholic.”

Bumpaholism? Oh yes, it’s a real disorder. At least, according to a recent US Women’s Health article, claiming that a large number of women want lots of kids for all the wrong reasons.

It’s just one more example of a recent media-driven onslaught against bigger-than-average families, fueled by freak-show-esque examples like OctoMom and Jon & Kate, and inspiring creative phrase-coining, like “competitive birthing” and “compulsive motherhood” (Good one, ABCNews!).

“Having babies isn’t addictive in the way that alcohol and narcotics can be. But bumpaholics feel compelled to procreate for many of the same reasons that substance abusers turn to booze or drugs,” reads Women’s Health. In this article, experts speculate about the reason women have more than a couple of babies: to get attention. To get waited on hand and foot by our spouses (that, I’m told, is far from a universal experience). To avoid returning to work or having to figure out what to do with our lives next. To get unsolicited comments and belly rubs from strangers. (Oh yeah, ask any pregnant woman; we just LOVE that).

It’s not news that human beings sometimes turn to compulsive behavior to fill a psychological void. Some fill that emptiness with money, puppies, designer clothes, long hours at work, meaningless sex, alcohol, or any of the myriad ways people find to self-medicate. But in this new crop of critiques, we’ve chosen to fix our collective criticism on that old throwback, the woman who wants kids.

I’ll be the first to admit that I find newborn babies awfully compelling. Their soft, wrinkly little heads, that baby smell, the scrunched-up hands, the first crooked smiles . . . all of those things seem to set off a dopamine flood in my brain. Looking at and holding a baby feels good. Didn’t nature intend it to be? Otherwise, we’d never make it through those sleepless first few months or overcome the urge to run away and join the circus.

But apparently we are no longer allowed to respond to our own natural impulses, even when we apply a healthy dose of reality and intellect to the equation. It’s people who stop at one or two children, the article says, who use their “higher brain functions to keep those instincts in check.” I guess the rest of us are little more than primates, reproducing willy-nilly to keep those hormones flooding in.

In the world of tell-all mummy blogs and reality shows featuring hassled, harried, and unhappy mothers, it’s become suspicious even to admit that we like kids, much less that we could be reasonably happy raising them (unless we’re mentally imbalanced, that is). According to the cultural mythology, mums hide their depression and feelings of emptiness behind domesticity and child-rearing. The implication? Having kids isn’t “real life”, it’s just a way to escape from it for a while.

Why do we question the motives surrounding the decision to have children (or not) with so much more cynicism than we do other decisions? If someone volunteers for a non-profit or has a large circle of friends, no armchair psychologist would bother to question whether she was trying to “fill a void” with meaningful activity or companionship. It would instead be accepted that creating relationships with other human beings is a normal, natural and human desire.

What about the idea that a large family can be intentionally and intelligently chosen? When did it become weird to like children, to want them . . . even more than two?

This is not how I planned it. I intended to homeschool my kids.

I had a miserable time in school myself. I was bored. I didn’t socialise well with my peers. I was too smart and too weird. Rio is, to put it gently, a lot like me. Homeschooling seemed like her ticket to a happier, wilder childhood.

This idea wasn’t a whim for me. I spent last summer taking training courses in home education, and the past year building up a small home-based pre-school that meets at my house four days a week. I turned our whole house into a de facto classroom. I read thousands of pages of child development books, educational philosophy and memoirs by successful homeschoolers. I wrote articles for homeschooling blogs and magazines.

So last year, we made our home a pre-school, and worked at building community. At first there was a lot of enthusiasm among our friends and acquaintances. It seemed like every mum I talked to at the playground was thinking about homeschooling her four-year-old. Everyone at playgroup was concerned about the local public schools. I held a few lunches for people interested in starting a homeschooling coop, and 20 families showed up.

But one by one, they dropped out. They’d quietly admit they’d enrolled their kids in school. Sometimes at the child’s request, sometimes because both parents needed to work, sometimes because they realised they just didn’t want to do it. Finally, there were only two or three families left.

I pushed ahead. In January, when our school district started registrations, I watched the deadline coast by. Instead, I called our local school to let them know we would not be registering. Rio overheard our conversation.

"Tell me about school,"Rio said when I hung up the phone. "Maybe I would like to go."

I told her that every city has schools that anyone who lives in the city can attend, and that these schools start at age five. She asked if I went to school and I said I had. She wanted to know what it was like. I told her about walking to the end of our long dirt road and getting on the big scary bus.

She stopped me, looking very intensely into my eyes. "Mama. I do not want to know how you got to school. I want to know what you did when you were there."

I wracked my brain for specifics. "We learned about what different size coins were worth. We set off model rockets. I had to go to the toilet by myself with no teacher to help, and it was scary out in the corridor alone. There was recess on a big playground with a colony of echidnas living under the swings. Some bigger kids told me I would get in trouble for eating lunch under my favourite tree. I loved that tree, so big and broad and shady."

"So," Rio said, "Learning about coins. This happened when you were, what, six?"

"No, when I was five."

?"Oh." Rio thought for a moment. And then she said this:

?"I think I would like to visit a school one day while I am still four. If I like it, I will try it for one day after I turn five. And if I like that, I think I’d like to try it for a month. Just to see what they are doing there, and if what they do there works for me, with what I am doing on my own. If it does, I will keep going. But if what they do doesn’t work for me, I’d like to continue homeschooling."

How do you argue with that?

I didn’t. I talked it over with her dad, who took her to a school open house the next week. To my immense relief, she found it boring and we planned to homeschool for at least one more year. She thought first grade looked intriguing because the first grade had a class pet. I told her we could decide about first grade when she turned six, and privately planned to buy her an iguana if it would resolve her school envy.

So I forgot about school and focused on getting out of her way while she learned to swim, to ride a scooter, to mix watercolour paints and to read (a little). Then, one morning, I watched Rio sitting at the table solving a maths puzzle with a bowl of smooth round stones. She’d mastered it, and was doing the same problem over and over again with ease.

"Rio, you’re getting so grown-up,"I said. "Soon we’ll need to get a book of school maths games, because you’ve learned this game so well."

"Don’t worry about that, Mama,"she said in an off-hand way. "I’ll be going to school in a few months, and I can learn math there."

"We’ll be doing school here,"I explained gently. "That’s what homeschooling means."

"No, Mama, I am going to school,"she informed me.

She wants, she said, to get out of the house more. She wants her own cohort of friends her age who live nearby. She wants to play different games than I’ve got in my treasure chest. She wants time away from her little sister, to be read a storybook in peace or do a craft without having to wrestle her scissors away from a toddler.

School will, almost certainly, meet those needs for her.

And finally, her bottom line reason: "Mama, remember last year, when I wanted to try homeschooling, and then I did try it, and I liked it? Well, now I want to try school. I like to try new things."

Of course you do, kid.

"It’s too late to sign up for school,"I said lamely, a little desperate.

I wasn’t thinking of her, at that moment. I was thinking about telling the homeschooling families I’d carefully nurtured connections with for the past year that we were jumping ship and signing Rio up for school. I was thinking about the dozens of hours I’d spent poring over child development textbooks long after my kids were asleep. I was thinking about saying goodbye to my daughter every morning and not knowing what her days would hold.

I was thinking about going to school myself, as a mum, and facing my Mummy Imposter Syndrome every morning in the mirror of the other mothers’ neatly brushed hair and co-ordinated outfits. Of nodding along quietly while they chat about how often they wash their bathroom mirrors and where they shop for kids’ clothes, and hoping no one finds out I dress my kids in whatever I find at clothing swaps and op shops. I continue to socialise poorly with my peers, as it turns out.

I discovered, right then and there, that I’m a little afraid of finding out who I am when I’m not covered in baby food and craft glue. What will I use as an excuse to cover my weaknesses — my messes, my lateness, my forgetfulness, my lack of stable employment — when my kids are no longer my sole, all-consuming responsibility? Would I use the yawning void of those kid-free mornings to write, or would I sleep till 11 and then surf YouTube for more videos of Olivia Newton-John singing Sam?

Finally, I thought about Rio, and none of it was good: What if the kids don’t like her? What if she cuts her own hair in the girls’ toilets? What if I let her wear crazy clothes to school and she gets picked on? What if she stops wanting to wear crazy clothes at all?

"Can you just call them and see if they have an opening, Mama?"

Wincing and trying to hide it, I called. Our local school was full, but another phone call revealed that one nearby had, miraculously, a sudden surprise opening.

Could I take it? Should I?

I know just about every homeschooling family goes through a little school envy, especially with the oldest child. There are a lot of strategies for working around this. I could steer her back towards my idyllic vision of her childhood.

But I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like Rio was asking to go to school because some of her friends do or because she wanted to go on a bus. Throughout the whole conversation, I felt I was speaking with the "adult inside", not the winsome four-year-old who wants to fly to Uluru one minute and dig a hole through the earth to Fairy the next. She was calm. She was clear. She made eye contact and used big words. She asked serious questions and listened to the answers. All of my school-based anxiety melted away. There was just me and my awesome kid sitting together talking. I saw school through her eyes, as just one more interesting thing we might do on the joint venture of her education, akin to yoga class or storytime.

After all my hours of panic and introspection and planning about my kids’ education, here we were at the precipice. School vs. Homeschooling. And there was no hypothetical child to protect or decide for. There was Rio, a person I’ve helped grow for the past four-and-a-half years into an ally both smart and wise. It felt as if she took my hand in this talk and said, "Don’t mind the cliff, Mum, we can fly."

So, school, here we come.

A mother of three daughters — 4-year-old Elby and twin toddlers, Matilda and Sadie — Wilder-Taylor wrote on her personal blog Baby on Bored:

"I really like to drink. I like the way wine softens the edges, smoothes out the line between "their time" and "my time," helps me to feel relaxed, helps me tune out. But I drink too much. I drink seven nights a week. Sometimes just a glass of wine but usually two or even three. I always seem to have some sort of excuse like "today was an exceptionally stressful day so I deserve an extra glass now that it’s all done. For me, it’s become a nightly compulsion and I’m outing myself to you; all of you: I have a problem."

Mums with a drinking problem are nothing new (Joan Crawford, Courtney Love, I could go on), but Wilder-Taylor’s announcement was such a shocker for four very specific reasons: her two published and one forthcoming books Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay; Naptime is the New Happy Hour; and It’s Not Me It’s You, and her blog for MommyTrack’d Make Mine a Double: Tales of Twins and Tequila.

Wilder-Taylor liked to drink and had built a reputation on a stiff mix of booze and babies. By giving up alcohol, she was dropping a key ingredient of the persona she had created. She was also exposing the darker side of this parenting generation’s signature drink — the always-appropriate cocktail.

Earlier this decade, Wilder-Taylor had been part of a welcome revolution, one in which mums and dads, rather than big publishers, puritanical doctors and unimaginative magazine editors, were writing the last word on motherhood.

With my first pregnancy and birth in 2001, the go-to information for pregnant and new mums was all What to Expect When You’re Expecting directives, such as eating toasted wheat germ on ice cream or asking my husband to sit in a closet to eat a pudding parfait. That and the Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy, whose author insisted a necktie and my husband’s dress shirts made for cool maternity wear.

Glossy magazines wrote "sleep when the baby sleeps" a thousand different ways. Editors featured page after page of pictorials demonstrating how to do yoga poses with a newborn balanced on my knees. Helpful? I suppose. Relatable? Not in the least.

Flash-forward to my second pregnancy in 2004 and, woah, who was in charge? Mums. Swearing, temper-losing, eye-rolling, totally imperfect mums, who, if the book jackets and titles meant anything, were nursing babies and cocktails — often at the same time.

Wilder-Taylor’s Sippy Cups wasn’t the first book to bring parenting and drinking together in an aggressively blase way. Two years before, Christie Mellor published The Three-Martini Playdate, soon followed by the Three-Martini Family Vacation. The cover of Brett Paesel’s 2006 Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom, copied Goodnight Moon’s line-drawings and colour scheme. While, somewhere in there, Robert Wilder wrote Daddy Needs a Drink.

So Daddy had a drink. Or two. Mummy did as well.

Alcohol-spiked words flowed, especially online in the most revolutionary form of parental expression: blogs. The "mumtini" was coined. Blogger parents were forced to defend knocking back adult beverages at the end of the day.

This new generation of parents had defined itself; a drink in one hand and a teething ring in the other. The What to Expect books were now oversized coasters, keeping a dozen sweating cocktails from ruining the furniture.

So what did it mean that a defender of drinking-mum culture was admitting she had a problem? Did this casual attitude about parenting and drinking convince new parents they could raise the next generation completely hammered?

If it did, then readers missed the point, Three-Martini’s Mellor says. Drinking, one of the few enjoyable grown-up activities that parents legally can’t share with their young children, is a metaphor.

"No, I am not encouraging my readers to down a fifth of vodka at their toddler’s playdate, it’s about reclaiming our lives as adults," Mellor wrote in an email. "It used to be that when we had children they became part of the family. Now children are the shining center of the family’s universe. I don’t think it’s helpful to the children, and I don’t think it’s good for parents either."

Tinkling cocktail parties represented adulthood for Mellor.

"At the time I wrote my first two books, it seemed to be the right metaphor; then suddenly bookstore shelves were groaning under the weight of amusing alcohol-themed parenting books. And now those authors who took their own advice too literally are jumping from the bandwagon onto the wagon. The fact is, my books aren’t about drinking; they’re about not centreing your entire life around your children."

The new mum-lit’s trademark parenting juice turned into a dependency for other writers, too. Former blogger Rachael Brownell spent quite a bit of bandwidth preoccupied with drinking and defending parents who drink. She blogged about drinking and parenting, and drinking while parenting, all while she was drinking and blogging and raising three young girls.

"Getting loose makes writing feel rebellious and assures me I’m part of a revolution, where we talk and write about our kids but aren’t afraid to assert our artistic, sexual, authentic selves over the din of our old lives falling away,"

Nearly two years ago, like Wilder-Taylor, Brownell joined a 12-step programme and gave up alcohol.

In an interview, Brownell said that writing about drinking made her feel a part of a group for the first time as a mother. Not only were writers like Wilder-Taylor talking about drinking, they were talking about being less-than perfect.

"All that language — ‘mummy needs a drink’ — all those books and blogs — that was someone coming in and letting some air out of this balloon of perfectionism. It wasn’t just ‘mummy needs a drink,’ it’s ‘mummy needs a drink because the toddlers are talking about rubber bands again.’"

Talking about drinking became a quick and easy or less personal way to say "parenting is hard and exhausting," she said. "But that’s not socially acceptable to say. What is acceptable to say is, ‘I need a drink.’"

If more high-profile parents come out as problem-drinkers will this change how we talk about parents and drinking? Can we expect to read Mummies Who Abstain? The Three Mocktini Playdate? Hmmm. Maybe. Watch this space…