My daughter turned 16 this year. It was ok, not as bad as when she turned 12 (we had a few months of Kevin the Teenager and then she sorted herself out). 16 means a number of things that I won’t go into, but it also means your last year at school.

Well her last official day (she has to go back for exams) was last Friday. It was a ‘Dress for Success’ morning. Whatever that means. Boys were meant to dress in suits and girls were to dress ‘smartly’ as if going to work.

So after  her dad dipping into his wallet, she came home with a dress. But this had to be returned because she couldn’t find tights to go with it. Why she hadn’t thought of that in the changing rooms I don’t know. I guess that’s 16 year old girls?

So dress 2 came home. Not as nice, but a) longer (so I preferred it) and b) she had tights that would go with it.

So Dress to Success day came. And she wore a dress she borrowed from a friend! And looked like she was going to a party.

Prom is at the end of June. Yet another dress saga!!

My kids have always been good at going to bed. But my middle child (the one who thinks he doesn’t need sleep, but like me really needs a good 10 hours a day) thinks he must go to bed exactly one hour after the youngest.  In the mornings we have to shout to stir him and all too often say “if you’re tired you should go to bed earlier!”.

Our youngest is 5 and goes up stairs to bed at 7.30pm. Last night, he lay awake for an hour talking to Pingu (he has to sleep with his favourite toy which happens to be a penguin not a teddy bear), so when middle son went up to bed he quickly came down to exclaim that his brother was still awake.

So youngest son, who doesn’t do this very often and was obviously wide awake, was told he could come back downstairs and watch a little TV until he felt a bit more tired. So that meant eldest son had to stay up too. He just couldn’t go to bed before his younger brother. I remember he was like this when youngest was a baby – at that time when their sleep patterns are 3-4 hours so bedtime is anytime! He was so miffed that the baby stayed up!

So the two of them sat on the sofa in the kids room: one watching Tangled and the other reading his book. About 45 minutes later (as I was starting to tire) we decided he had to go to bed, tired or not. Both of them. And when I checked in on the youngest at 10.15pm he was fast asleep.

Anyone else have this issue? How do you deal with one child needing more or less sleep than others? What do you do when your child won’t go to sleep? Share your tips here!

The build up was huge. All week, I’d been singing ‘Daddy’s taking you to the Zoo tomorrow’ to smallest boy. He’d heard it so often he was starting to learn the words and, on Friday evening, I told him he’d need to get lots of sleep because of all the animals we’d be seeing and all the stuff we’d be doing the next day.

So on Saturday, we set out early. A trip of about 65 miles to Chester Zoo. We arrived at 10.30 raring to go. There was even a dinosaur exhibition on offer – imagine the excitement!

We got out of the car end entered the zoo. And spent the next six hours peering at bored, sleepy animals, hidden as far away from the viewing platforms as it was possible for them to get. It was more like the Chelsea Flower Show (Savannah section) than a zoo. Cage after cage of trees and shrubs, with the occasional flick of an ear somewhere in the far distant corner. Occasionally, there’d be wild, slightly hysterical cries of enthusiasm as an over-anxious parent tried to make the most of when a baby orangutan, suspended in a cargo net seventy feet above our heads, scratched himself.

Meanwhile, small boy had got it sussed. He was almost exclusively interested in a small plastic Dinosaur toy and the games on the mobile phones we had with us. Regardless of the number of times he was encouraged/ordered to admire the small brown mammal sunning itself in thick shrubbery 120 feet away, the thrall of the £3.00 purchase reigned supreme.

But I recognise that Zoos have a problem. They used to be designed for us to look at animals, so they featured big animals in small bare cages. But now the moral tide has shifted and they’re forced to become Conservation zones with a moral role in the world – to be the guardians and ensure the survival of species threatened by extinction. In terms of the entertainment value of zoos I have no problem with this, but the consequence is that zoos must use cage designs that attempt to emulate the natural habitat of the

animals they contain, and in their natural habitat you’re probably unlikely to ever see, for example, a Tiger until you get a close up of it as it lands on you. But we can’t feed people to Tigers anymore, so all you get is the habitat without the creature.

But sod it, I’m a hopeless romantic – who’s up for West Midlands Safari Park?