Don’t romanticize the old days…

As a young working class mum who couldn’t sew, cook or do ‘Blue Peter’ things with sticky back plastic, Little House on the Prairie it wasn’t!

I made lentil soup and insisted the children ate it – they vomited it all back up so I reverted to something with lots of salt and sugar.

I spent a lot of time cleaning and washing and ironing the children’s clothes (cheap but new) and the boiled white nappies were hung on the line with great pride.  These were the things that were important at the time and, whilst some of it was a ‘class’ thing, I sometimes look back and wish I’d not been so up tight about such temporal things.

When I see the wonderful way my daughter parents my grandchildren and the incredible little people they are, I see a different world with different values and I’m proud and know that, in the words of Julie Andrews (aka Mrs. Von Trap) “I must have done something right”.

I once asked my daughter what she got from me and she replied: “shit tits”.  How we laughed, but, I know she got more than this when I remember:

• Packing up my three year old son to go on a lion hunt (in the back garden)
• Mountaineering up the stairs with a hoover flex (don’t try this at home)
• Singing…’Wide Wide as the Ocean’ with all of the actions
• Climbing real mountains together
• Always reading a bed time story
• Rituals, like fish and chips on Fridays and new jim jams on Christmas Eve
• Choreographing dances together and performing them
• Eating together
• Talking around the dinner table
• Praying for each other
• Watching a calf being delivered on a farm where we were camping

So, put lots of effort into making memories – they don’t cost the earth.

Nana Carole, Lincolnshire xx

[If you love Nana Carole, (and seriously, who doesn't?) you will probably also love Granny Ailsa.]