In this funny episode, I walk us through the longest hour of every mum's day. It starts with good vibes — bath running, pajamas picked out, doing all the voices during stories. Eleven minutes later it's chaos. The four-stories rule that's never four stories. The panda book that's been read every night for three weeks. The barcode my four-year-old asked me to read. The teaspoon wee, the six-minute hand-wash, the water that "tastes like it's been there a long time" (it had — twenty minutes).

I get into the brain-flip the second the lights go off — the deep questions ("do fish have feelings?"), the courtroom confessions ("I drew on the wall last week"), and the pink unicorn dressing gown that's been on the door for a year and is suddenly terrifying. Through all of it, one thought keeps me going: the block of Cadbury hidden behind the frozen peas.

And then the bit I didn't see coming — standing in the doorway after lights-out, watching them sleep like little angels, chest-aching with love, twenty minutes after one of them was confessing to wall-art war crimes. A warm, witty love letter to every mum doing the bedtime hostage negotiation tonight.