Child: 1 Parent: 0

When I was pregnant, I found out early that I was having a girl. I wanted to know, so I could halve the amount of names my husband and I were ‘debating’ and get going on my pet project: decorating a nursery. Being a 21st-century parenting cliché, I thought I was being terribly modern in rejecting any idea that my baby girl’s room would be a pink explosion. Oh no. I went for tasteful taupe walls (I think it’s called matchstick on the Farrow & Ball chart) and a delicate print of green hearts on some Osborne & Little blinds. There was a beige-toned rug and a few scatter cushions to brighten up an otherwise neutral expanse of floorboards and built-in white cupboards. And that neutral palette somehow made it intact through the nappy years right up to the phase where you often find a hairy lollipop stuck to the sheets.

Then, one evening, I climbed the stairs at 10.30 to find my three-year-old sitting silently at the top. She had something pressing to discuss. ‘Mummy, I’ve been thinking. I really don’t like the way you’ve decorated my room. That beige colour on the walls doesn’t go with my personality. I would like them to be purple.’ Such confident poise made me laugh out loud even as I packed her off to bed and told her we’d discuss this at a reasonable hour. Intense negotiations followed until sanity won the day and the natural authority figure in this dynamic got her way. Her personality was expressed, garishly I might add, with two tins of Dulux’s ‘sugared lilac’.

I wish the parents in our feature on page 26 better luck. Some of them have spent more on their baby’s nursery than I’ve spent on three holidays combined. One thing tends to be forgotten when you’re poring over colour charts. We all start off thinking we will only buy chic, sustainable wooden toys for them, and that we will die before we agree to plastering those soft blush walls with Disney princess sticker murals (yes, I pray kids never find out they’re a thing). Those cute little gurgling bundles are opinionated timebombs in waiting. And they will break you. Of course, now my daughter is 14, those purple walls are covered in posters, ‘woke’ sayings and pictures of her friends. At least, they were the last time I was allowed in there. So enjoy the power of that room while you have it, new parents. Because those days are truly numbered.