Michael Rosen would be top of my dinner party list, if we ever had such things. The poet and author, behind popular children's books such as We're Going On A Bear Hunt and Don't Put Mustard In The Custard, is flavour of the month in my house, with peels of laughter ringing out whenever my two read his poems. I'm not sure whether that was his intention but that's the effect Rosen's work has, making bedtime story time more raucous than relaxed. My boys particularly love his poem I'm Carrying the Baby which goes like this: Paul was three.

"Look at me," he said, "look at me

I'm carrying the baby,

look at me

look at me

I'm carrying the baby."

"Oh," said Paul, "look at me

I've dropped the baby."

They have memorised it, written it out in their neatest handwriting, and recited it with various failed attempts at different accents, particularly Scottish, bizarrely, with comedic effect.

They find the punchline hilarious, no matter how many times they say it, and in all fairness it is amusing especially with Quentin Blake's accompanying illustrations.

The poem reminds me of the morning I briefly popped upstairs, only to return and find my youngest - a baby at the time - in a completely different place on the living room carpet to where I'd left him. My eldest, like Rosen's Paul, was also about three, and had quite clearly been "carrying the baby".

I carefully quizzed him at length over how he had held him, had he thought to support his neck, still floppy from being so young, and exactly how gently had he put him back down. I even made him show me with a teddy just how he had been carrying him. Thankfully it appears he didn't drop the baby, and there was no harm done, and that tiny bundle is now a robust six year old who can give his big brother a run for his money in many things.

As a child I was a complete book worm and read at every given opportunity - while brushing my teeth, drying my hair, even in the car, despite knowing full well it would make me horrendously travel sick. I'll always remember my mum's endless pleas of "look at the views" during a driving tour around the fjords of Norway; the beauty wasted on me and my sick bag.

It baffled me then when my boys were learning to read but preferred to run riot rather than get wrapped up in a story. I wasn't sure if it was a boy thing. My brother used to get lost in car magazines and Jeffrey Archer novels when he was younger, but little else. Or were all the modern-day distractions and gadgets to blame for the lack-lustre interest in literature?

My two have shelves and boxes full of books but Harry Potter has no fans in our house, the popular Beast Quest Series is gathering dust, Enid Blyton doesn't capture their imagination enough. Much-loved stories of adventure from my childhood don't quite cut it nowadays. Mallory Towers is old school; Moonface, Saucepan Man and Silky the pixie didn't hold their attention enough for us to reach the end of the Magic Faraway Tree.

Thankfully, along came David Walliams who used words like bum and fart. His stories about billionaire boys and gangsta grannies with a penchant for cabbage soup had instant appeal.

The funny man's work has been read to death, and when the BBC jumped on the Walliams bandwagon with televised versions of some of his books, we reached saturation point.

Michael Rosen's well-thumbed book of nonsensical poems, Don't Put Mustard In The Custard, has filled in the gap between other authors, (Michael Morpurgo has taken over the top spot on my eldest's bookshelf where a mini library is slowly being devoured without any prompting from me) especially now that my youngest can read them himself.

So, if we ever had that dinner party, and could have our pick of guests, I would use it to thank the Rosens, Walliams and Morpurgos of this world for their part in keeping the written word alive for children when competing with the electronic distractions of today.