MY working pattern doesn’t allow me to do the school run every day but I try and do it when I can.

This is even though the children could quite easily get to school on the bus. Being in the car for that few minutes has become an opportunity to check in on each other and see how everyone is feeling about the day ahead.

I would love to tell you that we are one of those families which is up at the crack of dawn and that I have everyone’s lunches packed and a nutritious breakfast on the table by seven thirty.

However that would be a blatant lie. Mornings in our house are a mixture of yawns, groans, eye-rubbing, cries of ‘hurry up – we’re going to be late!’ school sandwiches being thrust into paper bags and permission slips being signed at the last minute.

A morning when someone’s tie, shoe or hairbrush is not lost is a good one. After the chaos involved in trying to get people out of the door on time, being in the car feels serene in comparison.

The children usually tell me which lessons they have that day and whether they are looking forward to anything in particular. My daughter Millie is the last to be dropped off and we often set each other the ‘three good things challenge’ just before she gets out of the car.

The aim of this simple game is to pick out your three favourite things of the day and report back in the evening as to what they were.

The effect of this little exercise is that you spend the day highlighting anything good that happens in your head, storing them away to report on later that evening. Today my list to Millie included an interesting conversation with a new acquaintance at Derriford Hospital, a hot chocolate shared with a member of my writing club whom I met for the first time and seeing a rainbow on the way home which was so beautiful I had to stop to take a photo of it.

As a bonus I also enjoyed some very crunchy red peppers when I got home from work. Millie reported that she had fun doing a presentation in her IT class and that her second highlight was getting into a warm car after school on a very rainy day.

She told me that she was saving her last one for the evening. When I checked in with her just now she said it was getting into her comfy reindeer pyjamas before bed.

The bigger (and more complete) picture of my day was not at all entirely positive. This morning’s journey to Plymouth took 90 minutes because of horrendous traffic on the A38, it rained almost nonstop all day and I still had two hours of extra work to do when I got home.

However, by playing the three good things game, my mind has been focused on the positives – the bits I want to remember. It becomes easy to look back on the day as a good one rather than one which was difficult or frustrating. We don’t choose many of the things that happen to us through the course of a day – but it remains entirely up to us what we decide to focus on and remember.

In a life which is naturally peppered with ups and downs, this little game is a simple but effective way to make sure that you remember the best bits of each day and not just the things that you would actually rather forget.