READERS of a delicate disposition should perhaps look away now, given this week’s latest parental crisis.

Since this is the first time I’ll be sharing our lives with you, I should first update you on the last 18 months of our demanding daughter’s life.

She’s been causing no end of trouble since entering the world, wailing, and weighing a whopping 9lb 1oz.

Carrying her and delivering her unto this world caused herniated discs and no end of other drama for her poor old mum (emergency surgery for discectomy and decompression because of said discs when she was six months) and, and then there was the colic and the early teething – oh, and the fact that she has still, not once, slept peacefully through the night.

The less said about the time she went for 26 hours without sleep, the better.

By now I like to think I’m inured to most of the daily drama. My eyebrows don’t even fractionally raise when she tries to climb on to the windowsill, empties entire kitchen cupboards, or attempts to wield the loo brush like a paintbrush around the upstairs landing.

But I definitely felt my heart leaping in panic early last week at the end of the daily bathtime ritual.

There she was, smelling divine thanks to a certain yellow shampoo, all ready to be lifted out on to her waiting towels.

Then there was some fateful crouching whilst holding tightly on to a rubber duck, and before I could fully register what was happening, little hands swirled the water and everything turned a really rather awful shade of brown.

It had already been a stressful day at work, and my brain was a bit slow to process the horror. It wasn’t long before questions were whirling in my mind – who, what, how and where on earth to begin?!

After quickly removing the child from the effluence, praying that there’d be no recurrence whilst she ran nude in circles around the bathroom, I then began a swift process of fishing out the major unmentionables whilst trying not to gag, washing every single thing that had been in there – dozens of small coloured bath toys – rinsing the surface, running a new bath, all before redepositing the child in the suds, washing and drying her before nappying and clothing her.

Then I collapsed in a heap for a few seconds before crawling down the stairs to prepare her bottle before bed. Oh, and make the evening meal.

All this before her father sauntered casually in the door from work, cheerily enquiring: “How’s my girls?”

I couldn’t possibly print my reply.