You expect that you’ll capture gorgeous snaps of your tiny sleepy baby and the first pictures of you as a family. *Precious memories to cherish and display forever. The reality is a tiny naked human with zero bladder/bowel control, which will lead to you being shit on within minutes. You haven’t slept in days, none of your clothes fit, your boobs are leaking like the Trevi fountain. And given that you’re still wearing an adult nappy, you’ve never felt less ‘camera ready’.

Each October, you and half a million other families descend upon the same muddy bog to ‘pick’ enormous half-rotten vegetables three times the price of those in your local supermarket. Your child will instantly fall in love with the heaviest and least attractive one, which you then cart three miles back to the car, caking yourself in manure and risking trench foot in the process.

Understandably, the baby who took a good 6 months to warm up to their nursery keyworker will not take kindly to being plonked on the knee of a giant bearded stranger. For older children, direct access to the big man himself allows them free reign to request whatever they want, leading to awkward conversations when the baby sister they asked for doesn’t arrive on Christmas morning.

A group of small children armed with wicker baskets fight to the death to collect the most chocolate eggs, which you then have to prise from their small sticky hands before the sudden influx of sugar causes them to develop type 2 diabetes. Obviously, you immediately forget where you’ve put them all, inevitably leading to the annual (very costly) trip to see the vets when, three months later, after the family chihuahua finds and scoffs two rogue cream eggs (foil included).

Spoiler alert: babies couldn’t give a flying fuck about animals. The entrance fee costs more than your monthly mortgage, the food is inedible, and the only thing that will interest your child is the £25 stuffed gorilla from the gift shop that you’re forced to walk through on the way out.

You’ve not even made it out of the car park before your toddler declares their legs are tired and demands to be carried the rest of the way. The baby does a giant poonami the second you put them in a pram suit, the toilets stink of wee and the queue to use them is seven miles long. The day ends with a total meltdown as you explain why you won’t take home the four-foot-long stick they’ve been carting around for the last three hours.

A three-hour flight in a confined space with 250 strangers who all hate you and your screaming child, followed by two fun-filled weeks of attempting to stop your kid from eating gobfuls of sand/burning like a crisp.

You used to spend long summer evenings in five-star restaurants sipping large glasses of Aperol; now you eat takeaway pizza in hotel bathrooms, watching Netflix with headphones on so you don’t wake the baby.

A logistical nightmare. You have two options here; risk your baby contracting a face-verruca by placing them on the floor while you try to squeeze your arse into damp jeans or flash your vagina to the entire family changing room as you attempt to dress with one hand. It costs £15 for a 30-minute lesson, and after four years, you’re two grand worse off, and they still can’t fucking swim.

In fairness, being stripped half naked at 10 am on a Tuesday in a freezing cold church hall before being smothered in coconut oil in the presence of 15 other crying babies doesn’t scream relaxing to us either. They’ll either completely lose their shit, or worse, you’ll have spent £6.50 only for them to sleep through the whole thing.

If you thought your wedding was a political minefield, the Christening is a drama waiting to happen. Despite never having set foot inside a church the entire time you’ve known her, your suddenly deeply religious mother-in-law expresses her passionate opinion on every detail; from your choice of caterer to what your baby will wear, throwing a hissy fit when you politely decline the yellow-stained moth-eaten christening gown ‘worn by 5 generations’ of your partners family she retrieved from the loft.