On a recent Monday morning my four year-old son played with Lego while I typed, deadline looming.

He sat on the floor by my desk, stirring Lego around a big plastic container to find the pieces he needed to make a racing car from an instruction booklet. This worked well until the rattling of Lego reached an angry crescendo, ending in demands for me to find a long black piece.

And so our search began. We started with a systematic stir of the plastic container, rattling Lego here and there, then checked the pieces he had strewn on the floor. Then under the bed. To put your hands under a bed in our house is to come up trumps with all manner of discarded items. Over the years, in no particular order, I’ve found:

• Apple cores
• Used tissues
• Lolly wrappers
• Banana skins
• Long forgotten pull-ups
• Unidentifiable Goo

The sales assistant at the sunglasses shop has her sales pitch ready for people who visit the mall in their lycra.

I was clad like a sausage because I had to make a last-minute dash to the shops to buy sunglasses after a gym class. My sunglasses had broken, and I’d been wearing an old pair rescued from my kids’ dress-up box that were scratched like an Instant Kiwi ticket. Sunglasses shopping was urgent.

Time is a mysterious thing that marches forward regardless of how we feel about it. Last week I was 39 and this week I’m 40.

Before my birthday I wanted people to ask after my age, so I could revel in my thirties for those final days.

Each day I told my children I’m 39. My four year-old son Luke is slowly coming to grips with time. For him, there is only today. Yesterday and tomorrow are muddled. He often asks me if Grandad is older than Great-Granny, or if Daddy is older than Grandma.

Last week he pressed my cheeks together like playdough, looked deep into my eyes, and said; “Mummy you are getting old now. You have a moustache growing.”

The turning of any decade is a milestone and I can remember feeling excited about the first two, some trepidation about being an actual grown-up for the third, and the fourth?

I took my kids to the library and they read books to a dog.

It wasn’t just any dog, it was Wilson, an 8 month-old trainee guide dog who had been invited to the Mt Albert Library to listen to children read.

Despite what you may be thinking, the library hasn’t gone to the dogs – this is a novel approach to encourage children to enjoy reading in a fun environment – after all, dogs don’t judge.

When it became obvious my three children are all left-handed, I felt like I had conquered the gene pool. Then I began to wonder if it was nurture over nature.

The numbers defied the odds – just 10 percent of the population has a dominant left hand, yet my husband is the only right-handed person in our family of five.

Could I be teaching our kids to use their left hand?