We say it with bums in our house

I think it's fair to say that having children is not very sexy. It's lovely, obviously. Life with children is full of love. But on days such as this one – or on other special occasions (you know, Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries and the like), you realise how romance has been, well, hijacked.

As a rather superb metaphor for this, I'll tell you what happened this morning. I had chosen a small card for Dan (we don't go over the top with these things, but doing nothing would be like saying romance is dead) which had, I felt rather appropriately, three hearts on it.

'The big one is mine!' I thought, 'And the little ones are the girls'! Yes, that's sweet, it represents three hearts, all choc full of love.'

So having written something inside explaining the above, lest it was not entirely obvious, and having given it to each of my daughters to then vandalise with their crayons, I allowed my eldest Ava to hand it over.

She did so very ceremoniously. First she sang 'happy birthday', ignoring my quiet instructions that it was not in fact her dad's birthday at all, it was Valentine's Day and we just had to tell him we loved him. Then she offered him the card with a small bow. All good.

But then Ruby, who thought the card was a present, grabbed it and ran off with it. And despite the fact she had literally just seen it, and had watched me put it into the envelope for her daddy, she embellished her incredibly theatrical opening of the card with plenty of overly dramatic gasps.

When it was finally handed to the intended recipient, and he glanced down to see what all the fuss was about, Ruby pointed at the picture on the front and said: "Iss BUMS!”

And yes, in much the same way that having children colours every part of your life, or at least the way you regard every part of your life, I concur with Ru. It does look a bit like bums. In fact, if you turn it upside down, it looks a bit like two funny shaped poos coming out of one big bum.

Not very sexy, no. But whether they are all bums, or just one big bum and two small poos, they represent the three of us, and hey, what's not to love?!