Tuesday, April 03, 2018

The fake widow and the greedy baby

With two thirds of the family with us family dinner yesterday was chaos. Ten people squashed around the dining table on a variety of chairs. Ham for most of us, feta and spinach pie for some of us, fish fingers and pasta for the smaller amongst us. Boast alert ... I got everything cooked and on the table - and still warm - at roughly the same time. Is that a first, children of mine?

Cwtchy chaos. I love it. It's what we Welsh mams do best: feeding our babies. 'Have you had enough? are you sure? Go, on there's plenty left. Have a bit more.'

This propensity to force feed our infants seems to have made its way into the local bird population. I've recently watched a mummy robin feeding its almost-the-same-size baby on a branch outside the kitchen window. As soon as mummy has gone off in search of titbits Baby Robin hops onto our fat-ball feeder and helps himself, making sure he's back on the branch and tweeting hungrily before mummy gets back.
Meanwhile my food prep was harshly interrupted by the appearance of a spider in my bag of potatoes. 'Waaaah!'
My scream must have been loud as Husband came hurrying out. 'Have you cut yourself?'
'Spider,' I said, pointing at the potatoes.
'Oh,' he shrugged and returned to whatever he was doing leaving me muttering under my breath, 'I sort of hoped you'd get rid of it for me.'

I herded it under a jam jar and waited for Younger Son to arrive to do the duty. 'If you've caught it under a jam jar why didn't you just get rid of it yourself,' he asked.
'Because it came out of the bag I thought it might be some rare exotic poisonous beast.'
'In a bag of Welsh potatoes?'

He examined it and decided it might be a pretend widow. Fake widow? Mock widow? Some sort of imitation so I felt justified. 
Even if their sting is no worse than a bee sting. Which incidentally hurt a lot.

2 comments:

SmitoniusAndSonata said...

That spider looks as if it's doing the can-can ... No wonder you were surprised!

Liz Hinds said...

Or the hokey cokey.