Izzie has just spent her first night in her cot in her own room. Despite what I’ve said about accepting the passage of time, how it’s natural for a baby to move from one stage to another and instead of losing anything, you’re gaining a deeper understanding and a richer relationship, it’s still an incredibly bittersweet experience to see your daughter move on. Scratch that – it’s a painful, heart-rending, panic-inducing kick to the balls. And it hurts.

All week I’ve been putting off setting up the monitors, as though burying my head in the sand could somehow avert the inevitable. I secretly hoped they wouldn’t work, or I wouldn’t be able to figure out the instructions, or we’d have a power cut or no heating and she’d have to stay in the Moses Basket beside my bed, in my room, with me. Because for all my pontificating and philosophising, I’m just as emotionally insecure as the next parent, and I’m struggling to let go.

And that’s what parenting is all about. Our children do not belong to us – they belong to the Universe. And we are just borrowing them for a time. Each stage of their lives lasts just as long as it’s meant to, and no matter how much we might want to cling to a certain period because it makes us feel good, or important, or validated, we have to learn to let it go, release it emotionally, and move on to the next.

Easier said than done.

We put her in the cot in a grobag and she cried and cried. As we’re not advocates of the ‘cry-it-out’ method, I put my hand on her chest and rocked her gently from side to side until, after adding teething gel and a dummy, she suddenly went out like a light. So I removed the dummy and went next door and felt sick. My stomach tightened into knots, my arms tensed as though I was preparing to box, and my legs jiggled with nervous angst.

Ten minutes of sweating and writhing about in agitation, plagued by guilt, worry, my inability to accept change, and I could bear it no longer. I crept in there to find her still fast asleep, and in the same position I’d left her.

I spent the next hour staring at the monitor, watching the temperature gauge, waiting for it to burst into life – nothing. I woke every couple of hours feeling emotional and panicked. At four, I got up to check on her, and once again she was fast asleep, though in a slightly different position – about ninety-degrees away from straight. But she seemed okay, so I went back to bed, stared at the monitor for an hour, turned up the heating.

I got up at seven but she was still asleep, and it wasn’t until eight that she began to stir. After all my worrying, all of the stress and mental anguish, she slept right through from eleven at night till eight in the morning as though it was nothing.

Admittedly, she was facing the opposite direction to how we’d put her to bed – her feet to the headboard – but it just goes to show: this growing-up lark is far harder on the parents than on the children!