On obedience, I read a brilliant article about rebellious children in The Guardian. Before I had kids I imagined, rather smugly (what an idiot I was) that if you watched all the programmes, read all of the books and the magazine articles on how to get your children to do exactly what you want them to do i.e. sleep at the set routine times, then they will. But there are a lot of things that you don’t account for in this imagined pre-baby utopia. You try to follow ‘the book’ nonetheless, because ‘the book’ is the bible and you create a world for yourself where letting the baby sleep anywhere but the cot is a parenting manual sin
