Now that's a bright idea

I suppose there are a few explanations for the anomaly that greeted me when I went in to see my daughter after her post-lunch nap.

I could be losing my marbles – hmm? Or at least forgetting things. My daughter's nearly a year old now. I refuse to accept the fact I'm suffering from 'baby brain', a condition make up by mums I feel to allow them to get away with murder or something quite close to it.

Our house could be haunted. This is not really possible considering we are the first people to live in it. Our last house was almost certainly haunted so I can speak with some authority when I say there are no spirits in this house, not even vodka.

So I am left with one explanation. My daughter turned on the light in her room.

Because that is exactly what I was confronted with when I went into her room. The light shining bright like a beacon hanging from the ceiling.

I have to admit, I did do a double take on entering her bedroom and quickly sifted back through my memory bank to see if it was possible I would have left the light on but a quick trawl through my mind came back with a resounding no.

What really gave my daughter away as the culprit was the fact she was stood up at the end of the cot in reaching distance of the light switch. The other big give away was the pleased as punch expression on her face, which was clearly saying 'look what I've done'.

I blame my husband completely for this latest development. It was indeed he who would brag when she was just a few months old that our daughter knew how the light switched worked. Repeatedly on entering and exiting her room he would count to three and flick the switch. Our daughter would wait with bated breath for the 'three' before breaking into a beaming smile as the light switch flicked with a click and her room lit up as if by magic.

This information must have been stored away in her brain until she had mastered the ability to stand up in her cot and reach out for the switch. She must have been thinking as soon as I can stand I'm going to get to that light switch and turn it on, oh yes I am.

What a triumph she must have felt as with a push of her tiny little index finger she was able to illuminate her whole bedroom.

She must have literally woken up from her nap, crawled to the end of her cot and stood up thinking, well I'm awake, what next? I know, let's turn the light on.

I'm now just waiting for when she wakes up during the night and decides to switch her light on. That could give me and my husband a real fright to wake up in the middle of the night to realise a light had been switched on across the landing. Thoughts of burglars and those ghosts will certainly cross our minds before our sleep-fuzzed minds remember our daughter's latest trick.

The other option is to move her cot out of reach of the light switch but my daughter's far too enterprising for this to stop her.

She'll probably get her teddy bear to hold on to her ankles as she stretches across.