I’ve been pondering bad habits this week. There’s plenty of socially dubious stuff our oldest child has done, like picking his nose and eating it, or the more unusual licking the shelves in H&M on one occasion, but what about us as parents?

It’s a subjective topic but my ‘bad’ habits probably outweigh my husband’s in his opinion, although it infuriates me that he still blows his nose using loo roll and then stuffs the used tissue inside the cardboard tube to hang around spreading snotty fumes, which defeats the point of using it in the first place. He also cuts his toenails and leaves them lying around for the baby to pick up – who fortunately has an aversion to putting anything in his mouth at present – otherwise he’d be chowing down regularly on the equivalent of human pork scratching.

But husband argues that mine are much more worse and/or annoying, including the spatial awareness of a grizzly bear which leads me to constantly blunder into him rather than wait for him to get out of the way, asking him a question and then walking into another room to then become livid when he can’t hear me, leaving things on the stairs to ‘take up’ (he could avoid this one by actually picking the damn things up himself) and (the most heinous) flicking my contact lenses out wherever I might be at the time. This has the added consequence that they make their way into the most innocuous places, like that time I was having a pedicure and the beautician found an old one stuck to the bottom of my foot, or the more alarming day when my husband found one stuck inside his foreskin…don’t even go there.

Should we accept each other’s bad habits as bothersome quirks or is there a point when they become unbearable? Discuss.