Time For Tea

My youngest daughter invites her new best friend round for tea. She’s a sweet little thing with angelic curls, a lovely smile and good manners. It’s all going well and they disappear upstairs giggling, leaving older sister in peace to do her homework and me free to prepare their supper. I like my kids to have a good diet. I cook fresh, homemade delights whenever the mood takes me, and even when it doesn’t, and I always make sure their play-date pals leave my kitchen having devoured something vaguely nutritious and healthy.

So after an hour of banging my pots and pans, I turn around to find the little cherub staring at my back as I stir away at the stove. ‘What are you cooking?’ she intones in her cute little sing-song voice. From this moment on it all goes downhill rapidly. I’m not dealing with just any kid here. I have before me ‘Fussy Child’.

‘Fussy Child’ does not like my painstakingly prepared offering, so I improvise, and thinking on the spot, offer her the greying fish fingers that I discover in the back of the freezer. She doesn’t like fish. She doesn’t like potatoes or pizza either, but we finally settle on something she will eat: pasta. It has to be plain pasta with no sauce, mind you, as ‘Fussy Child’ does not like sauces, or cheese, or butter, or anything else apparently.

By now, I am banging around the pots and pans just for the sake of it, and also because it offers some minor relief from my culinary frustrations.

My kids, sensing that it’s mum, and not the pasta, that’s about to boil over at any minute, are very quiet, exchanging worried glances, and tucking into their supper with over-enthusiastic vigour.

The pasta is eaten, plainly, and they happily trot off to play once more, leaving me with the dirty dishes and a welcome silence. I’ll know the next time she comes over that before she can say ‘I don’t like that’ I’ll slap that plain pasta down on the table quick as a flash, and all will be well.

We know that all kids can be awkward at times, but somehow I feel a new sense of empathy, or possibly sympathy, with ‘Mother of Fussy Child’.

Perhaps it might be an idea to ask her round for dinner.....................? Maybe not.