“Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” – Robert Fulghum

With that in mind, I am having a bolt plus 5-lever Mortice lock fitted to the inside of my bedroom door. 

I am sure that my middle-aged heart would not cope with the strain of one more three a.m. wake up call.  Other parents will know the kind that I mean.  Those ridiculously early, dark mornings when you are woken from a deep sleep by a sudden chilling start.  You know that someone is watching you.  Even with your eyes closed, you can tell that someone is there.  You can feel their breath stirring the fine, invisible hairs on your face and in that split second before reason and reality kick in, you are consumed by terror. 

There is a stranger in the house.  An intruder in the room, watching, waiting to see if you make a move.  It may take a second or two but eventually you realise the intruder is less than three feet tall and is not an intruder after all. 

They have all done it, all three have stood beside my bed - watching.  They never went to daddy’s side, they never went to fetch him when they had a bad dream or needed the toilet or a change of sheets.  Instinctively my children just knew they had a better chance of seeing Father Christmas water skiing down the Goyt River than they had waking daddy. 

Now when they wake me during the night it is because they have forgotten their door key.  Or else they have made it inside and, although they think they are sneaking as silently as a ninja, they are actually making enough noise to wake the entire street.  As of old it is not dad who wakes but mum. 

It just goes to prove that we never stop looking after our children, its only the ways in which they need looking after that change.