Towards the end of my pregnancy, I started to get a bit panicky about making sure we had everything we needed. Then one day I was waddling down the road and met a mother with a baby in a pram. The baby was very cute, but looked like he'd been attacked by a wolverine with these massive deep scratches beside his eye. I asked the mother what had happened and she responded, Oh, he scratched himself. Those little nails are sharper than you'd think.

Immediately, in a big panic, I lumbered as fast as my swollen ankles could carry me off to Mothercare, there to buy their entire stock of scratch mitts. Actually I just bought three packs of two - and I don't know why, it's not as though tiny babies get dirty, so allowing for losses and mismatched gloves if you wanted to buy them two packs would probably be plenty.

Do you want to buy them?

They're very cute, tiny little mittens for tiny little fists, the sets I got had a plain white pair and a pair with grey and white stripes. I like the striped ones better, but then my baby was wearing bright clothing from the beginning. Some people like newborns in all white clothes, I like patterns to disguise the stains a bit.

After my baby was born with talons that would gouge out her eyes if she was coordinated enough to touch them, I started putting the scratch mitts on her. And astonishingly, this baby who couldn't even focus on my face was always able to remove the mitts. And this is their main downside - the wrists can't be narrow enough to prevent them coming off, because if they were tight enough they'd be hard to get onto the baby's hands.

I tried other brands of mitts thinking that Mothercare might just have an unrealistic expectation of how chubby newborns' wrists actually are, but they were all the same.

As scratchmitts go, the Mothercare ones washed nicely and were very cute. At £2.50 they're not massively expensive either, and they do make a very cute gift. You can also get 3-packs for £3 or £3.50 and Mothercare also sell them in sets for premature babies.

On a practical level, though, they're one of those things that we buy for babies and by the time they're big enough to fit the mitts they're already past the point where they'd be useful. If you want to keep your baby's hands covered so he doesn't scratch his beautiful newborn skin, put socks over his hands. They don't come off. Or you can buy sleepsuits with foldover sleeves, which are good for when you don't want people thinking you're a weirdo who's so tired she's forgotten which limb does what.