I have compiled two stories into one here because I feel like they both fall into one category of “How we saw Mum do it” because the funny part of the story is not what actually happened but the way we, the kids, saw it using the beautiful imagination God blessed us with! 

The first of these stories happened when we had our Tesco food shop delivery, usually on a Sunday. This service is really helpful for our family as it means every week mum doesn’t have to carry food for 8 people and a cat up the drive… instead a random spotty teenager or grumpy old man does it. It also means we can all pull our weight by doing something together in a super efficient manner. On a rare one or two weeks, a non-essential item would slip through the system and not make it to us like marmite, for example. 

On the week in question, Tesco seemed to have missed a few items, but the thing we noticed after the Tesco man had left was the bananas, a very important fruit in our house, so mum went back outside to see if she could get them. In reality, she had called the man, who had not yet reached the van to check and as it turned out, he had accidentally missed a crate of food and he brought it up to our door. When mum came in with the crate, she was very surprised to find everyone in the house in utter hysterics, because of how we imagined the interaction.

In our minds, the Tesco man had already driven away and mum ran with all her might to catch up to him, had hit her slipper against the window, forced him to stop and then dragged him out of his van to search for our bananas. It also transpired that the Tesco man standing at the door heard what we thought had happened and was chuckling when mum gave him the crate back!

The second of these stories comes from an evening dinner when we were having a staple meal in our home, fajitas and enchiladas. We all sat down to eat, with everything laid out on the table so we could serve ourselves. There are usually 7 or 8 of us at the table and so a common problem is that we run out of cheese very quickly! As everyone knows, over the last 5 years, the cost of, well, everything has gone up massively, and it’s not stopping, so every penny counts. Mum, aware of this, told us, “we need to stop wasting the cheese! Cheese is really expensive!” while putting a small portion of cheese onto her wrap. This was met with a chorus of laughter and mime as we showed what we had seen her do. The way we saw that moment was that we saw her saying that cheese is expensive while furiously filling her wrap with the cheese so that it was flying away as she threw it down onto the plate. This is regularly mentioned when we have cheese with any meal, particularly fajitas.