Birth comes at you fast. If you are lucky. One minute, you're home trying to wrangle the bassinet, change table, expensive yet useless musical mobile. Next minute, in hospital groaning, cursing and shouting.

Then you get your tiny darling. Not that mine were all that tiny - finished up with a 4.7-kilogram dumpling who barely slept for two years.

Last year, according to those fabulous people at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were nearly 300,000 darlings and for the sake of their mothers, I hope they were tinier than mine. I did quite a number of those perineal exercises and pelvic floor routines but it was all a bit of a stretch. Sorry.

Death comes at you fast, too. My old dad wasn't that old, just 57, when he died from a pulmonary embolism. Mum was just 62, lung cancer got

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