“It feels like it’s starting to get away from us,” Jack, my husband, said as we lay in bed this past weekend, our children’s howls and thumps reverberating from the den. By “it” he means the time we have with our babes. And yes, of course, there’s plenty of time left – our kids are 13, 11 and 8, as of recently, and still love to hang, as they say.

But the fact is, our days of being parents of small children are pretty much behind us, having passed in a dog-tired blur. While I don’t miss those early days exactly, I am conscious of the passage of time – that it expands like the Big Bang, hurtling away faster with each year.

“It’s the longest, shortest twenty years of your life,” a friend once told us, back when our kids were merely toddlers. We were up most nights then…