Before a certain age, a child’s role in Mother’s Day is very much mediated by Dad.

I was certainly expecting this to have been the case this year, but in an age of proactive nurseries and modern day supermarket product placement, Jack proved more on the ball than I’d ever have expected him to be.

Mother’s Day preparations for Jack had begun on Friday, and I couldn’t help but be impressed with his prudence. Emerging from the bath on Friday evening, he whispered that there was “something in Mummy’s bag from nursery” I had to take out and hide.

Having overcome my initial confusion, I realised this “something” was a hastily carrier bag-wrapped card made by Jack, which consisted of a paper construction of a flower bud and stem which broadly resembled a tulip.

Dutifully, I put this aside on the shelf in preparation for Sunday. My own plans consisted of Jack and myself waking up early to make a special Mummy breakfast in bed.

My own lack of preparation meant that, in actual fact, the first thing we did on Sunday was scoot off to the local shop to pick up some eggs and muffins – crucial ingredients I had neglected to buy in advance.

Fortunately though, this gave Jack an opportunity to orchestrate the next stage of his Mother’s Day surprise. We emerged from Tesco not only with eggs and muffins, but also with a Best Mum in the World balloon and a glittery bunch of pink Crysanthemums.

The balloon, I later found out, had been something Jack had been promising to buy his mum all week. In the case of the flowers, they had so caught his attention on our way out the shop, we’d actually turned back halfway down the road to go and buy them, after Jack had insisted that we “definitely must buy flowers on Mother’s Day, daddy”.

Clearly unsatisfied with my lack of organisation, Jack insisted on carrying flowers and balloon all the way home, ingeniously poking the balloon stick into the bouquet and thus diminishing my responsibility for mediating Mother’s Day to little more than financer and ‘shop escort’.

Although by no means as important in this year’s calendar of special occasions, I find that I am looking forward to Father’s Day with significantly more relish than I had been. I wonder what Jack has in store for me?