Dh is working late so I did bathtime on my own tonight. This is a fairly normal occurrence and I must have done hundreds of solo bathtimes since the girls were born. Tonight, the girls were in the mood for extra mischief...

About halfway through the usual 'splashing and hairwashing' procedure, I noticed that there wasn't a single towel in the bathroom. Not one. Dh had been on one of his 'wash everything that moves in the house' trips and most of out towels were draped over radiators drying out. I remembered that there was a spare clean and dry towel in our bedroom. I weighed up the odds and went for the 20 second dash option.

As I ran along the landing, I head R and G squal with laughter. Then I heard splashing. Lots and lots of spashing accompanied by squeals of mischevious laughter. Then I head the thud of water hitting the bathmat.

I ran back in to the bathroom and nearly slipped on the standing water that had been mysteriously decanted from the bath. In 20 seconds, with the cunning use of a number of plastic cups, the girls had decided that it would be a wizard wheeze to indulge in a very scientific 'let's see how much water we can throw on to the bathroom floor before Mummy comes back' experiment.

To say I exploded was an understatement. There was water everywhere. The floor was slippery. The bathmat was sopping wet. The pack of opened nappies on the floor was soggy. The changing mat was now a water slide.

When I stopped ranting, I realised that R and G were both completely silent. I lifted G out of the bath and dried her off. I told G to stand next to me while I repeated the exercise with R. As I was drying R, G caught her eye, they both looked at me and cackled quietly to each other with little grins on their faces.

It was hard to be angry any more. In fact, I wanted to laugh. After all, it was only water and was easy to clean up. Plus they had clearly had such a brilliant time that I felt bad for getting so annoyed with them. I gathered my thoughts, popped my metaphorical Mummy hat on (it's a fez in case you were wondering) and told them to apologise to me. They duly leaned over and give me big kisses. Monkeys! They can be so lovely one minute and absolute s**s the next.

20 seconds! What would they have achieved in a minute? A re-enactment of The Poseidon Adventure?