When I was nay but knee high to a grasshopper, (or something like that) my absolutely favourite things in the whole wide world (which is actually quite small to a tiny tot) were eating banana butties and watching playschool.
Even now, the smell and taste of a simple sandwich with slices of banana in the middle conjures up images of childhood. Tiny squares of doughy, squishy bread with the crusts removed, obviously, and lovely 'nana sandwiched inbetween....Mmmmm....Yum!
Probably with a glass of ice cold milk, and probably while wearing my nightie with my 'never, ever take off' snake belt....But maybe that's too much information....
So imagine my delight, this week when I was able to give tiny, wee banana butties to my Ella, and watch her devour them with the same gusto and delight that I probably did.
Ok so she is only 10 months old and most of it was thrown onto the floor or creatively spread across the tray on the high chair, but it's early days in the whole, 'feed yourself' regime...
I'm also not going to give up on the scrambled egg, which was ceremoniously spat out with sheer disgust this morning.
When I was little my mum used to give me a lovely boiled egg with toast soldiers in a variety of new and vintage egg cups which she still collects to this day ( remind me, I'll show you one day). The eggs were bought from the greengrocers in the village, in the days before supermarkets were the norm, and now sadly long gone. These eggs were special because they came from the local farm which had one particular infamous hen called Molly. Now, the way that the farmer could show which eggs were laid by Molly was to mark the base of each egg with a cross in black ink.
It became quite a ritual at our house, me and my mum checking the base of the boiled egg to see whether it was laid by Molly. Now, I guess, with hindsight I maybe should have questioned the incredible productivity of one hen - I never had a boiled egg that wasn't laid by Molly. Poor thing she must have been exhausted...
Ok, so I like to think of myself as slightly intelligent and a bit worldly wise which makes the revelation, only a few years ago, of Molly's existence, or lack thereof, something of a shock to my rosy little world.
Now, I'm not completely stupid. Even though mum still marks a cross on the bottom of my boiled egg, when the situation arises (sadly not nearly enough), I figured that Molly had died a long time ago and she was just continuing this tradition as a bit of a joke. Oh no, Molly was never even born...She never even existed!! It was all a ruse to get me to eat my eggs and one which, hat's off to you mum, worked a treat!
I know she is probably jumping up and down with complete excitement at the chance of doing it all over again with Ella, of continuing the lie...! But it's a good lie, so that's ok.
A bit like Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny, it's a tiny white lie that makes our childhood that little bit more lovelier, and so it is good!
