As it transpired, it was a weekend of new beginnings for Amelie. Not only did she get her first taste of face-painting (quite literally - she'd licked off those whiskers within ten minutes) and an historic first trip to a castle, but on Sunday she finally waved goodbye to her cot. And then waved goodbye to her bedroom, when she realised she could get up on her own and head off down the hallway at will.

We've resisted the move to a bed for a while now, due to the fear that when Amelie's no longer caged in by the bars of a cot, she's likely to spend her nights in the living room, watching CBeebies on Virgin Catch-up, and helping herself to biscuits. But when I got her up on Saturday morning, she kindly demonstrated to me how she could get her foot over the top of the cot-rail and take a theoretical death plunge onto Mish, Moosh & Mogo. Thereby wiping out not only her own life, but three of the last surviving (and most expensive) pandas on the planet.

So having decided that action was required sooner rather than later, I wasted no time in looking for the instruction manual to Amelie's cotbed. Well, I say I wasted no time. I actually wasted an hour. When we bought the thing a year ago, I remember putting the instructions in a safe place for future reference, but frankly the place was so safe, I couldn't crack it without a combination of good luck and a better memory. Neither of which I had.

Fortunately the internet came to the rescue, and having located the manual on the Mothercare site, I was soon on my hands and knees with an allen key, working on the world's biggest transformer. An hour later, I'd successfully created a bed from the ruins of a cot, and transformed Amelie from a baby behind bars to a grown-up sleeping beauty...


Although whether she'll get any sleep if I let her take the iPad to bed, I'm not sure.