The woman who claims GIN is every mum’s secret tonic!

... and (hic!) her wickedly funny stick drawings have made her an online star

ON THE battlefield of Britain’s mummy wars, a new heroine has arrived. Katie Kirby, fan of stiff drinks, sleep, and bribing children with biscuits, has written a book that will have mothers everywhere recognising themselves through the bleary eyes of another interrupted night.

Hurrah For Gin, by the 36-year-old former advertising executive, will be published this week. It is crude, rude and funny, a gloriously irreverent account of early-years parenting illustrated with Katie’s distinctive stick cartoons.

Since her blog of the same name has half a million views per month, the book industry has already anointed it a Christmas bestseller.

As an antidote to the Gina Ford school of perfect parenting, it has struck a chord.

Hurrah For Gin covers everything from how to play dead when you have a hangover, to the seven stages of sleep deprivation, family summer hellidays (as Katie calls holidays) and the joys of chicken pox.

It trashes routines and reward charts, debunks baby-led weaning, and praises the free childcare that is the start of reception year at school.

It believes there is no bad situation that cannot be made better with a mouthful of squeezy canned cream for kids and a stiff gin for grown-ups.

But the writing, brimful of joy and pride in family life, gives little clue to Katie’s first harrowing experience of motherhood – a tragedy that inspired her to become the queen of mummy bloggers.

Her first pregnancy ended in termination after a routine scan showed a baby girl with profound disabilities.

When Katie’s second pregnancy went full-term and she gave birth to a healthy boy, now aged six, the legacy was a crippling anxiety for which she had to seek medical help when he was just a few weeks old.

Her recovery, based on the acceptance that she and her new baby were ‘perfectly imperfect’, encouraged Katie to write Hurrah For Gin.

‘It’s about the funny, raw side of motherhood,’ she says, ‘not the perfect version portrayed in new baby magazines. That’s why I started to write. I wanted to say motherhood is really hard and it’s OK to find it hard, but if you share it, then it can also become funny.’

Katie grew up as the middle of three sisters in Worthing, West Sussex – the daughter of an IT-worker father and a chiropodist mother who now run her online ‘Gin Bunny’ shop selling cards featuring Katie’s cartoons.

She met her husband Jim, 35, at the London media agency where they both worked. The couple married in 2011, by which time they’d already moved to Brighton and Hove, leaving London ahead of the birth of their first son. Katie began to blog after the birth of her second son, now aged three, and swiftly attracted a huge online fanbase.

Some people have asked how her sons will feel about their childhoods being stripped bare in print. Katie is confident it’ll be fine.

‘I don’t think they really understand yet,’ she says. ‘My eldest said to me, “Mummy, imagine if someone we don’t know buys your book.”

‘I had to tell him that was kind of the point.’

Here, then, are a few of the sharply observed low-lights from a life overshadowed by kitchen discos to Taylor Swift, and pitched battles over whatever bit of plastic is flavour of the moment…