I SAID goodbye to my baby boy this week. Nothing permanent, I haven’t officially thrown in the towel although I came pretty close last week after suffering a particularly nasty strain of mum flu.

It absolutely floored me, and the sound of Ben once again putting up a fight over his dinner, his pyjamas, not appreciating why he couldn’t eat Play Doh, was almost too much to bear. I did think of taking myself off to a hotel somewhere until I was recovered but on reflection I thought this was particularly harsh on Ben’s dad, plus I was a bit skint after Christmas.

Anyway, the reason my baby boy has gone for good is because his dad took him for his first proper haircut. It had to be done I suppose, it was getting in his eyes. Now he can walk it is becoming a health and safety issue. I loved it, though. It was going a bit curly at the back and his long sweep over still had blonde highlights from the summer.

Anyway, as I laid in my sick bed his locks were shorn and he was returned to me looking like a 12-year-old. All proper, neat edges, short in all the right places. It was enough to make me cry.

Apparently I just kept repeating “my little boy” over and over while stroking his now quite dark brown hair.

He looked perfectly fine, it was a very good haircut, it just gave me a little glimpse of how quickly he was growing up. The fact that he had slept in a duvet for the first time that week as well, instead of one of those baby sleeping bags we have been using, put the tin lid on it.He was practically a grown up. It was only a matter of time before he was taking himself off to the barber and getting it dyed black or, worse still, shaved off completely.

To make matters worse, I packed his dad off armed with camera to capture the first cut and strict instructions to keep a lock of hair back, so I could stroke it during his adolescence.

However, when I asked for these valuable keepsakes a look of panic flashed across his face – he’d completely forgotten to do either. I cried again.

Dad was last spotted in the bathroom, picking out all the cut hair that had lodged itself in Ben’s clothes and arranging them on a strip of Sellotape, as if that would pacify me. It did not.