WHEN I began writing a regular opinion column for The Northern Echo, back in 1996, I had three children, aged five, three and one.

I wrote about everything from politics and religion to women’s issues and whatever happened to be on telly that week. But with three lively, demanding boys tearing around the kitchen while I sat at my keyboard, I, inevitably, touched on the vagaries of family life too.

Readers shared in my desperate hunt for that frustratingly elusive Christmas toy – the first Buzz Lightyear, a character then driving hundreds of thousands of parents up and down the country to insanity and beyond.

And I confessed when I spotted, to my horror, little black nits – the scourge of primary school parents everywhere - in my blond toddler’s curls just as my long-haired sister gave him a cuddle a few days before her wedding.

Readers discovered, not long after me, my shock at finding I was pregnant again – and again. You shared those two later pregnancies and births with me, along with agonising over the formidable responsibility of naming a child, as my brood swelled from three to five.

By 2005, my column had evolved into Mum at Large and I had the privilege of documenting all the funny, chaotic, hair-raising, frustrating, uplifting and occasionally heart-breaking events of our family life for The Northern Echo.

Getting anything done felt like wading through treacle, and I longed for the equivalent of an air traffic control tower to help keep track of our various comings and goings - especially after the head teacher called to tell me I’d left my four-year-old behind at school after rushing off with his older brothers to tennis lessons.

You readers were wonderful. I received countless letters, particularly from older parents telling me how they missed those noisy, messy, chaotic days, the best of their lives, when their children were young.

And now that my boys, aged 15 to 26, are – nearly - all grown up, I know exactly what they mean. I miss those days too.

You joined me on the emotional rollercoaster ride through everything from my boys’ first days at school to the pressure of exams, teenage angst, leaving home for university and venturing out into the big, wide world of work.

You shared in our grief at the loss of much-loved grandparents and my terror when one of the boys was rushed to hospital by ambulance after nearly drowning when he was caught in a rip tide and swept out to sea.

We had countless trips to hospital, from a life-threatening asthma attack to concussion, broken bones and a particularly hair-raising night when we discovered our ten-year-old crying in pain in the garden at 3am after, it emerged, he jumped from his bedroom window while sleepwalking.

But, thankfully (and I am thankful every day for this) they all survived, limbs intact.

Of course, I didn’t dare write about some events, in order to spare everyone’s blushes. Some escapades are best left to the imagination. Let’s just say my boys were typical teenagers.

But while they often had me tearing my hair out, I probably spent more of my time laughing. Because having a gang of spirited, joyful, mischievous boys is, above all, fun.

They thought it was hilarious when I found a grey fleece lying on the stairway while sorting out laundry in their bedrooms one morning. I couldn’t work out if it was a dirty one I had dropped on the way down, or a clean one on the way up.

The only way to be sure was to smell it. But, strangely, it didn’t have that distinctive scent of sweaty teenage boy, nor the fragrance of something freshly laundered. I was baffled.

After sniffing under the armpits for a good few minutes, I noticed the puzzled expression on the face of the man who was there to lay the new stair carpet. It was, of course, his. The boys never let me live that one down.

Since this is my last column, as I move to begin a new job, I will leave you with my favourite joke of all time.

Three-year-old Patrick, a serious, thoughtful boy, told a friend we had a giraffe in our garden: “He’s insistent it’s a real one, not a toy,” she told me.

When I asked Patrick about it later, he explained: “But you’re always telling us to shut the front door to stop the giraffe getting in.”

Thank you for all your lovely letters and emails over the years. I will miss you. And for any new parents out there, I will pass on the one piece of advice my mother gave me: “Just take it as it comes.”