I JUST spotted a tweet that read: “I was a great parent, until I actually had kids”, or words to that effect.

Never a truer word my friend. Never a truer word. I can hear myself now, in my younger, child-free years, smugly announcing how I would raise my children if I ever became a mum.

No child of mine would ever get away with this or that, no son or daughter would ever misbehave or show me up or be waited on hand and foot.

Oh no, they would be perfect little angels, all respectful and totally excellent company 24/7.

They would perform their household chores with enthusiasm, go to bed on time and never answer back.

And they would eat whatever I put in front of them, and if they did not, they would just have to go to bed hungry.

No child of mine would ever be fussy, no way, not on my watch. I just would not stand for it. Ha. What an absolute hoot.

If I could go back now, I would slap my silly face with a frozen fish finger and tell me to stop being so utterly ridiculous.

Little did I know I would fail miserably at all of the above and then some.

I am not even sure how it happened, but it turns out I am a complete sap when it comes to my kid.

He is a bit of a smasher, we got lucky, but he also has me wrapped around his little finger... his dad too.

You know how it is, most parents would rather lay down in the road and let a herd of morbidly obese elephants trample over them, than allow their children to come to any harm, and as a result we sometimes let them get the better of us.

I know it. You know it. For me it is mostly the food thing.

Our son has a nasty dairy allergy so that has not helped matters, but it also means I cave more easily when it comes to mealtimes.

He does have a healthy appetite, I will give him that, just not for anything particularly good for him.

Beige works, or freezer tapas as one of my mates refers to it... and I am sure he would happily survive on baked beans for every meal given half the chance.

Sure, they count as one of his five a day, but there has to be some other version of veg in the mix.

On a good day, when the wind is blowing in the right direction, he will eat peas.

But only small peas, as in petit pois. He can tell from ten paces if they are bog standard garden peas. They are too big apparently.

To be fair the same level of restriction applies with chips as he will only eat skinny fries, not chunky ones, which leads me to have conversations with staff in pubs and restaurants I never thought I would.

“Could you tell me how thick your chips are please?” is not a sentence I have ever had cause to utter before parenthood.

The biggest frustration with this scenario is the fact he would eat practically anything he was given as a toddler, then he got wise and started to make his own rules, especially when it involved anything of strong nutritional value.

As a result, I have become the ultimate warrior when it comes to the battle of getting veg into my kid.

Of course I am not alone in this unrelenting quest, as conversations with my mum mates confirm.

Between us we have some seriously devious tricks up our sleeves and most of them involve a blender.

First and foremost, the classic pasta sauce with veg blitzed into it to disguise its actual existence in said dish.

Works a treat, unless a stray chunk of pepper gives the game away, then all bets are off.

You may as well serve them up a plate of woodlice and earwigs, it would get the same reaction.

Do not even think about hiding veg underneath other items on the plate such as mashed potato, that is entry level stuff and will never wash.

Some of my friends with slightly older kids who have earned their stripes in this game have taken their skills to a whole other level.

One pal blends butternut squash into her kids’ macaroni cheese in a bid to fool them into thinking it’s just an extra cheesy sauce.

It worked for a while but now they have sussed her and it is back to the drawing board.

She also bakes tasty looking biscuits packed with healthy seeds and the like but reluctantly admits she eats most of them herself.

Down the road, another mate takes the time to blitz broccoli into green pesto to give her tribe a veg hit.

The lengths we go to. It is at desperate times like these we would do well to remind ourselves most of us were raised on Spam, faggots and Smash... and look how well we turned out.