Will Harris on the military operation of parenthood

“Oh God, no! Oh God, we can’t have lost the noo-noo!” This despairing wail is issuing forth from my sister’s rear end, my sister’s front end being currently occupied underneath a two-seater sofa at my dad’s house in the West Country.

“Noo-noo,” says my niece, who is nearly two, and is passing through a developmental phase where she repeats the last word of every sentence she hears. This means you can just about get away with swearing in her presence (as I do frequently), so long as you’re quick-witted enough to tack on an extra couple of words and hope she doesn’t notice.

“Have you found it yet?” asks my sister’s partner, a one-man bomb squad of sticker books, boxes of biscuits, in fact anything to diffuse the inevitable meltdown when my niece realises all this commotion about the noo-noo isn’t just some elaborate game of peepo.

“Yes, I’ve found it. Obviously,” says the darkness under the sofa bitterly. “You have got the bic-bics ready, haven’t you?”

“She is a pint-sized generalissimo with an army of two”

“What have you lost?” asks my dad, wandering in from the kitchen. It is his 60th birthday today, so – if you consider that none of us would be in this situation if it weren’t for him propagating his genes about willy-nilly – all this is technically his fault.

“The noo-noo,” says my stepmother, buried up to the armpit behind the TV. “Bloody Hell,” says my dad, before remembering to add: “said the hippopotamus.”

“Topomus,” says my niece.

So here we are, five adults between the ages of 28 and 60, frantically turning an entire country cottage upside down in search of an errant noo-noo (NB. I am not really searching; I am wondering whether, at this stage in the process, and with my sister already teetering on the brink of madness, it would be a wise move to point out I don’t know what a noo-noo is).

All this drama, of course, is lost on my niece. She hasn’t even asked for her noo-noo. Instead, she is quite content to continue industriously transferring stickers onto my stepmother’s antique furniture (something else I am studiously ‘not noticing’).

Spending the last few days with my sister’s young family has been an eye-opening experience. They may have got parenthood down to a well-oiled military operation, but it’s my niece who is at the top of the chain of command. Every time she moves, a new toy is thrust at her. When she opens her mouth, a biscuit appears. She is a pint-sized generalissimo with an army of two, and a limitless arsenal of Peppa Pig merchandise.

My sister emerges from beneath the sofa, her nose wrinkling. She glowers up at her partner. “Has she…?”

The rest of us dive for cover, but it is already too late. Our little dictator has released a weapon of mass destruction.