Right now, the house is silent and calm, as Mr Boxer Shorts is out with the girls on a shopping trip. Shopping for moi.

That is a complete and total first. Normally, he forgets. Normally - I let him forget. I do that in order to allow him to show me that he can do it without me needling him. That he can demonstrate his love for me, and surprise me.

Strangely, it's never worked.

As I turn 40 in 4 days time (deep breath, exhale, relax... you can do this) I made sure that this year he would not be allowed to forget. And so he hasn't

The last time he took the girls shopping for me it was actually on the day of my birthday, and he went up the high street with them before lunch. There isn't a lot up our high street. If you're not in the mood for coffee shops or charity shops, that leaves you with two jewellers, one sports shop, a book shop and one very expensive luxury electrical goods shop (this one sounds promising!)

I knew that the resulting box was too small for a stereo, but the beaming faces told me whatever was in there was specially picked by them.

Sometimes, don't you wish that your other half would steer your kids towards something you'll like?

To this day, I have a small tree made out of wire, with blue rocks for leaves, growing out of a slab of granite.

It doesn't just collect dust, it sucks it in, and requires immersion to get it out!

But it still has pride of place on my dresser, because my three year old thought it was beautiful and thought I would too. So of course I do.

Today, to buy something for my 40th birthday, my husband has taken them to the Glades in Bromely. The magic ingredients of one attitudinally maladjusted 8 year old, one 5 (nearly 6) year old with a cold, and the normal saturday crowds of a shopping centre are bound result in him spending 10 minutes rushing into the nearest shop and bullying them into buying something from there, and then spending 40 minutes in a cafe drinking hot chocolate to make it look like they were shopping for a respectful length of time.

And that nearest shop - it's going to be a jeweller.

Because - when it comes down to it - it always ends up being jewellery. It's such an easy fall back. I should have realised this way back in the day, when he turned all my shirts blue and gave me a bracelet as an apology.

It's not like I haven't tried to drop hints about what I'd like. I saw an apron in the kitchen shop that I really liked. I told Miss Trouble Pants as we walked past (twice), and then I told Mr Boxer Shorts that I'd told Miss Trouble Pants. So in my mind - there is at least 1 person who should know that I'd like an apron. Except that the kitchen shop in question? It's in our high street. Not the Glades.

I know what you're thinking - "An apron?? Why on earth do you want an apron? You're willing to turn down jewellery in preference to an apron to wear in the kitchen when you're cooking fish fingers?"

Well, yeah. Sorta! I started wearing a freebie apron I was given, because it gives me something to wipe my hands on, and otherwise I end up walking around the house with a dishcloth over my shoulder. And then I saw this apron that looked really funky - I just liked the idea.

And truthfully - I don't do cheap jewellery. I don't want huge amounts of money being spent by the children on my presents. I don't wear a lot of jewellery as it is, and yet I have a large amount of necklaces living in my jewellery box. They don't get worn for years. I have my troll bead bracelet that I wear every day, and my chain with the piccolo and star pendant. Sometimes I switch that for a chain with a heart locket. Sometimes I take it off and forget to put it back on for a week.

So jewellery is not really me. Unless it's more beads for my troll bracelet. Or a leather version of the bracelet that I could use instead of my silver chain because I think they look quite good.

But that's neither here not there. Whatever bling my children have bought me, it's the most beautiful bling in the world, and I'll wear it all day.

Because they've given it with love.

And probably very sticky hot chocolatey fingers.

I had the immeasurably pleasurable experience today of accompanying 32 seven and eight year olds on a school excursion to examine rocks and soil.

I say immeasurable, because there really is no scale that can accurately rate the level of enjoyment versus panic that a trip like this can induce.

Miss Trouble Pants always wants me to go on the school trip with her. She's still young enough to think I am cool. I know that won't always be the case, but I revel in it while it's offered.

The instructions for the day were to wear old jeans or trousers that can get dirty, with the school shirt and jumper on top. Wellington boots were to be brought along too.

As a parent helper, I presumed that the same requirements were going to prevail (with the exclusion of the school uniform part, that might be a bit kinky) so I dressed down accordingly, and turned up at the school gate. There were three classes going to the same place, and the parents for each class gathered in the staff room to wait for the buses. 

Our bus arrived nice and early - first one on the scene, and promptly broke down outside the school. With one bus in front of the school, there was now no room for any other buses to get through and so the other classes had to walk down to the main road to get onto theirs.

We waited for ours to get started. Then we waited for it to get fixed. And then we waited for a new one to come. From Millwall. 

The staffroom was stifling - we'd all dressed for outside in the freezing drizzle, so eventually we all had to strip down to the lowest layer with our piles of outer swathing on the floor. In all, we ended up waiting an hour. But an hour in a boiling staffroom was heaven compared to a room with 32 stir crazy children who were expecting fun and excitement.

Eventually we were on the bus and on our way.

As the mother of two girls, I am very naive in the way of boys. To me, normal boy behaviour seems to be misbehaving. I never quite know whether a game is normal boy fun, or a fight. Like that game where boys try and kick another boy's legs out from under him. Now to me - that's being naughty! But apparently to boy mothers it's perfectly acceptable.

So I am the tyrant mother who is always bossing the kids about. The nagging one. I think they hate me. They also ignore me, so there isn't too much harm done. I get the feeling that I am not supposed to slap them about either. How unfair is that? There are some kids that could really do with a good slap up the backside of the head!

Luckily buses these days have seatbelts, because that limits the scope of misbehaviour! It doesn't do anything for the noise though.

Because we were an hour late, we had to rush through the first few things, which was analysing rocks for their qualities. As there wasn't a huge amount of scope for getting dirty, some of the boys under my care had to resort to rubbing the rocks on their faces to try and get some filth on. This is something my girls would never think of! It's almost as if they had a reputation of dirt to protect!

The centre had a good playground to let the kids burn a few engery bars down. The boys ran off in the direction of a football, and the girls played some intricate game of it in the corner.

I hid in the opposite corner, sucking down coffee from my flask. It was blissful for about 5 minutes - until the first casualty of the day. And guess who - of course, my daughter is face down in the woodchips, having fallen off a log face first.

She's spitting out dirt - must be taking the topic of the trip very seriously! But underneath the muck there are no grazes and no blood, so the only real injury is to pride.

The next part of the day is painting with dirt. Yep - dirt mixed up with water to make mud. They all drew three trees with pencil, then use brushes to paint the dirt over the top. They painted with chalky, sandy, and loamy dirts, which make three distinctly different shades of brown. I was quite impressed with the results. 

Then came the muddy part of the day - a walk up to the local church with is built from flint and sandstone. It wasn't as muddy as I feared it might be fortunately! Because we were so late we had to skip a few other mucky activities, including "mud rolling" in order to leave in time to make it back to school.

Just before we board the bus to come back to school the kids run around like crazy for 5 minutes. That's all it takes for the second casualty of the day to occur. And it's my daughter again. I was washing my hands when someone came to tell me she'd fallen over, and I laughed and casually finished drying before I went out to check on her. But then I looked out the open door and saw then entire class including all the adults crowding around her as she lay prone on the ashphalt. Shit! I abandoned the drying and ran out feeling guilty.

She was fine though, she had a graze and probably a bruise on her butt, but it was probably mostly shock at the time. Her legs slipped out from under her and she'd hit the ground hard just below her hip. Her pride however was ever further dented, and she just wanted to sit with me on the bus on the way home. She was crying as we got on because her teacher pairs them off rather than letting them choose their own seat mates.

He's a very smart man though - he manipulated the kids in front so that she had no partner, and then apologised that to her that she'd have to sit with an adult. Which was me. 

So we got to sit together and chat all the way home without her being embarrassed.

There won't be too many more moments where I can take an active part in her school life - let alone her want me to be there, so I love the chances I get.

And I am glad we missed out on the mud rolling.

* Picture credit: It's the cover of a book called "The School Trip" by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen, both of whom have been perennial favourites of my girls!

Tonight was the Sunday night bath, which is a weekly ritual that the girls love. Having grown up with a brother, I am relieved for the sake of the general household aroma that mine are both girls, and therefore likely to continue to enjoy cleanliness even as they reach the teen years.

But baths tend to take up a lot of time because the girls love to play. They still have bath toys. Or more correctly - toys that happen to now live in the bath. They'd squeal and laugh and spell out words for hours if I let them. They get out looking like a pair of little pink prunes, and the bathroom is soaked. 

During the week there are days where we can safely skip a bath, especially when we're coming in late from drama or ballet or any of the other myriad of extra curricular activities we stack our afternoons with.

Sunday on the other hand, is the night before the week begins again. So there is no skipping to be done. Everything needs to be squeaky clean and ready for school. It's the night I stack all the skivvies in the drawer, line up the grey tights, fold the trousers, hang the blouses, iron the tunics and polish the shoes.

And of so course it's also hair wash night, which makes the whole bath thing that bit more involved.

Miss Comic Relief has long thin fine hair. It's not a problem to wash and comb, although keeping it tidy is another thing altogether. But Miss Trouble Pants has long thick wavy hair. It takes ages to work all the shampoo through in the first place, and three times longer to get it out again. It has to be conditioned after shampooing if I'm going to have even one hope in hades of getting a comb through it afterwards.

So the way it works is like this - I wash and rinse their hair first, then smother it in conditioner and pin it up so that it really soaks through. Then I let them play in the bath for a while.

But this week I am not really very on the ball. I've had a cold since monday, when the gods of snot decreed that I should runneth over, and I've been battling the sore throat, cough and sinus headaches all week. It's not actually a bad cold. I just feel crappy. I feel crabby. And I act it too.

I am so crabby that the joyous sounds of my happy children playing and laughing grate on my nerves, and I hide out in my office while they bathe. I'm only in the next room, but the sound is somewhat muted and more bearable. All that pleasure and delight. Ergh. 

I wait until they've reached perfect prune density, then I go back to rinse off the conditioner and get them out of the bath.

I am greeted by a strange sight. As Miss Trouble Pants stands up - a foam "t" sticking to her backside - I notice a strange red rash. It's like a red blob made up of tiny dots just above her bum cheeks. Like dots of blood under the skin. 

I am going in for a closer look, my eyebrows narrowing as I squint at it. I can see that it's a concentrated patch of dark spots.

"What have you done to your back?" I ask, although I already fear that the rash is one of those terrifying varieties that doesn't go away when you press a glass against it, and I am visualising the sodden trip to the A&E in our crappy that had broken down earlier that day.

I don't expect giggling from both girls, and a small blue hippo to be presented as exhibit A.

It's the suction cap that holds the netting bag of bath toys to the tiled wall. Comprehension dawns in a rush, and I realise that what my daughter has on her back.

It's a hickie.

A hickie from the sucking kisses of a plastic hippo!

There are more on Miss Comic Relief's back, although they were not as successfully done, so don't have the really scary look of meningitis. They still stand out on her very pale skin.

Still, at least the hippo didn't invite her up for coffee!

Miss Comic relief has just been to her first Build-a-Bear birthday party. It's something that she was looking forward to with great zeal, because up to this point her big sister had been to three, and she'd been to none. She said it wasn't fair - like a Build-a-Bear party is some kind of right of passage.

If you don't know what Build-a-Bear is, the clue is in the name. You go in to the shop, choose a lifeless furry carcass, stick a cloth heart in it, insert a sound chip with an annoying amercian voice or a random noise deep into its guts, and then stuff the crap out of it and sew it up.

Oh, and don't forget the most important part - whisper a wish into it.

You get to take the pledge of stuffed animal allegience, and receive a birth certificate and a box to carry the thing home with you. It's all so tickity-boo I could just spit with pure delight.

And if you detect an element of sarcasm in my voice, it's because I don't fully uphold the whole thing with the level of joyfulness that apparently I should, because I think it actually devalues the commodity of a "Teddy Bear".

Look at it from our generation's point of view. Did you have a one special teddy that was your favourite? Did someone special give you that teddy? In all likelihood - unless you were that child that played with a brick wrapped in a flannel. Called Alan (the brick, not the flannel), then you probably had a special toy which was quite possibly a teddy bear.

You probably didn't have 56 teddies of various colours and styles that some speccy, spotty holiday jobbing teenager stuffed and stiched for you. Actually, they don't even need to stitch, they just pull the loose back stitched tight and tie a knot.

I think that shops like Build-a-bear water down the whole teddy industry. It's like printing more money to save the econmy. It doesn't really work as expected.

Of course these days it's not just bears - it's bunnys, dogs, cats, wolves and hello kitty's. I can get on board with that concept a bit better than the traditional teddy bear, but because the teddy bears are also available - and little girls LOVE more teddies - they still choose them.

So here was this party, at build-a-bear yesterday. After lunch at McDonalds, 18 six - or nearly six - year olds were running about the store choosing their new best friend. The party budget defines the selection of carcasses that the children can choose from, and at today's party Miss Comic Relief choose a simple teddy bear in a soft light brown. It's a nice teddy, and feels so soft!

I'd have loved her to have to chosen something other than a teddy, but it's up to her to choose (and besides, I wasn't there, I'd rather brave shoe shopping with Mr Boxer Shorts than stand in a shop stuffed to the gills with 18 children all suffering from McDonalds induced hyperactivity).

Having chosen a lifeless bit of fluff, the party guests proceed with all the steps of making a new best friend. And they do this while sitting on the floor of the shop.

Makes it a fun fun place to be if you just happpened to want to go shopping there with your own kids, doesn't it! And it gets worse when the next party is lined up ready to come in, complete with hovering mothers, but the entrance is totally blocked by the previous partie's various motherly appendages attempting to collect the multitudinous offspring from the floor.

Of course, mine came out in tears. Despite just having had a wonderful party time. Firstly because her big sister annoyed her (by simply existing), and then because the speaking thingy in her bear was quiet, and everyone else's was loud. The final upset was because I wouldn't stay and spend money on clothes for her bear.

I put the symptoms down to McD overload and put the wheels of motion into play in order to leave.

I identified her jacket and fleece because it was -2 degrees and a blizzard outside and we escaped to the roof with the loot. (that's where the carpark was, but it makes a good allegory.) And we reached it successfully and without further tears until she realised she'd forgotten her McDonalds toy.

Multilevel hysteria sets in - the McDonalds toy is almost as important as the new bear friend, so the dutiful mother (that's me) starts texting the party holding mother in order to ascertain if there are any McD toys left behind. Yes. Toy nirvana is achieved and a date set for the handover. (Monday at school).

We get home without no further tantrums, other than Mr Boxer Shorts muttering dark threats at the car, since the mini blizzard is now in full flurry, and the wipers on the car cross exactly three times before popping out again and making happy grinding noises at us, plus the fact that we have to stop at the tennis club to pick up George (the camper van) who got a flat tire earlier in the day and had to be pumped up then abandoned.

It's just a non stop ball of fun around our place.

Once at home, the new bear starts to settle in for approximately ten minutes before a new round of hysterics is launched as she realises that it's not sewn together properly at the back and the lining is coming out.

It turns out that the speaking box had to be inserted after it was sewn up, as she'd forgotten to say that she wanted one at the right time. Which explains why it's now falling apart, as it had to be unpicked for that, plus why the box is closer to the elbow than the hand - and maybe why it's not loud enough to hear without a closed loop for the hard of hearing.

As I prepare to sew "Beanie" up, she voices a new concern - the heart may have fallen out while they were playing games.

"Of course it didn't, I reassure her. It was sewn up then."

"No" she quavers, "this was before they sewed them up."

What the frick? What kind of crazy games get played with toys that have their guts hanging out of them? Road kill intestine maze games?

For goodness sake I think, as I shove my fingers into the belly of the beast, feeling about for a heart. There is nothing but polyester wadding in there.

"Yep, there it is" I lie through my teeth. "All fine and beating like a good un,"

I sew the bear up quickly and hand it back.

Both girls then settle down to play with their amassed collection of Build-a-bears. They have a total of 5 now, plus one non build-a-bear bear that I keep insisting gets played included, since it was given to Miss Trouble Pants by her grandmother when she was little. And gets lonely if left out.

This is my point of devaluing the whole "teddy bear" concept. They are no longer special bears. They are a commodity. They are a party favour. They are collectible items that are mass produced.

Plus the whole party aspect seems like a huge pile of stress. Held on a shop floor, with barely enough room to move around and a spotty party leader shouting out things like "Repeat after me! My bear is special!" at the top of his voice, then stopping as someone points out that they already did that bit, and are now trying to get rid of the party goers.

I am relieved that my little girl spoke up when she didn't get a talking chip in her bear, rather than coming home crying that she missed out on it - which is what I would have actually expected to happen with her. But I kind of feel that the whole thing is over taxing on both the parent and the child, as it looked pretty chaotic.

It would be nicer if the company provided a room for parties, to give them a feel of enclosure, and slight privacy (even if it was glass walled) and also to make them feel more special than to actually sit on a shop floor. Do you let your kids sit down on the floor in Boots or Debenhams?

She obviously enjoyed it, since she wants a build-a-bear party of her own when she turns 6 in March, but I have no compunctions about saying no to that - because I don't think that I could stand the stress of it, plus she'd probably choose yet another teddy bear.

But of course since it's her birthday, my final decision will remain to be seen. Despite my opinions on the devaluing of the teddy bear, I actually like the concept of the store. I think it's a fun idea. I'd just like to see the teddy bear part played down. I'd like to the see the party choices NOT include bears, but focus on other animals. I'd like a room for parties to take place in.

I think that they are probably raking it in, and don't give a fig for my opinion however.

Plus she had a ball, loves her new bear, and is happy to sit on any floor whatsoever.

This store is merely a result of this generation, and of what society is like now in the average western country. Our kids have more toys than we ever did when we were kids - and we weren't deprived by any means. Whoever said that less is more was right, but it's a thoroughly ignored bit of advice in the stuffed toy department.

I think it's possible to simply have too much stuff, certainly possible to have too many bears. Plus there is nothing more disturbing than a teddy bear wearing a wig. This is just wrong.

So while she cuddles and talks to her her new bear for the next week (after which it will be languishing, forgotten in the toy basket) I will be taking time to chat with my old bear, who is nearly 40 years old.

Because Teddy Bears should be special.