What things did your parents do that you look back on and think ‘that was clever’?

[Geekster1963]

My Mum used to give me and my sisters a fruit gum each on long journeys (the old Rowntrees ones that used to be hard), to see who could make it last the longest. We thought it was great as we were getting a sweet but it stopped us from arguing. Clever.

I remember when my first baby tooth came out I lost it in the garden and was devastated my Mum told me to write a note to the tooth fairy and put it under my pillow. I was so excited to see she had been and left me some money and said she’d found my tooth in the garden

This one wasn't my parents but DH when the kids were small. If we were ever out in the car and went through or past a place with brightly painted houses he'd say, "Look, it's Balamory!!" The kids would be agog, staring out of the windows to see if they could catch a glimpse of Miss Hoolie et al!

I love the tomato and your Grandad Marrow it’s the sort of thing my Dad does.

I had a panda that I took everywhere with me. He got absolutely filthy. So my mum borrowed a sewing machine from next door and said she was going to give him a new coat. The next day he had his new coat. I was 4.

When I was about 12, I was in the loft and found the old panda! I had genuinely never worked out that she'd just bought a new toy.

This was my Nan rather than Mum:
Every time we had stewed plums or some other fruit with pips or stones, we would count the stones with the rhyme about who we would marry: Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man beggar man, thief. We knew the rhyme was true as Nan always got "sailor" and grandad had been in the Royal Navy. (I pretty much always got "rich man". 😉)

Well I think my mum was a fast thinker. I believe I have told this before.

One day she decided to do some sausage rolls. She always had some left over pastry in the fridge or freezer. Anyway, she made them as I was surprised to find them quite sweet. Not taking my word for it she asked everyone else. Yes it was definitely sweet pastry.

Undeterred, she took the plates out to the kitchen and came back with ..Cherry rolls! You will of course all want to do this at home so here's the recipe: Remove the cooked sausage from the pastry cases, carefully. Open a tin of cherry pie filling. Scoop this into the pastry cases, serve with a flourish! Not sure what she did with the sausage meat but presumably we had that another time. Probably with mashed tatie!

My mum was brilliant at really cheap treats, saved for special occasions. I had no idea how cheap malt loaf was until I left home (and still see it as spoiling myself if I buy one)

Love reading these

Santa came in through the loft hatch.
Once my dad, a tad drunk, managed to chip the door frame in the bathroom (where the loft hatch was- I've also no idea how he did it) but he threw some glitter on it and said it was where santa had bashed th door frame with the presents.

My Mum was great with cheap treats too, Fairy Bread was one, bread with a sprinkle of hundreds and thousands, or a few strawberries sliced up with a spoon of "top of the milk", pairs of cherries together on a stalk were held up as earrings to be admired before eating.

When I was 4 I was obsessed with the Bay City Rollers. To get me to tidy my room, my dad told me he'd invited them for tea and they'd be arriving at 4pm, so I'd better get cracking in putting my toys away. I didn't believe a word of it so carried on playing in my room upstairs. I could hear my parents talking in the kitchen downstairs, at the back of the house when the front doorbell rang, bang on 4pm.

I heard my dad walk down the long hall to answer it, and my mum asking, "Is it them?" from the kitchen. I heard my dad open the front door and say, "Oh hello, boys, come on in. She's upstairs at the moment", and that was it - I fled to the wardrobe and hid till my mum came up and told me "they'd gone".

It was about 10 years later that I found out that there had been a door bell at the side/back gate of the house as well as at the front door, wired up to the same bell. It was easily reachable through the kitchen window.

I have a photo of me as a child holding a crocodile sandwich, most likely given to me with the accompanying “Make it snappy” joke.
And telling a small child to ask for a long weight (wait) never gets old.

I get told off by dh for telling kids made up stuff, I just tell him “Those who don’t believe in magic, will never find it”

Yes the world is a marvellous wondorous place.
But surely there’s room for 2 gnomes under the road - one lighting the cats eyes in front of the car and the other one blowing them out behind.

My grandad loved to do magic: card tricks, making coins disappear, pushing a glass through the dining table. If I asked how he did them, he would say "it's pure magic". When I was older he explained how some of them were done; others I found out about by reading books, especially the one about pushing a glass through the dining table.

When we were little and staying at my gran’s, my great grandfather always instigated a game of knifey while we were waiting at the table for meals. It was simply spinning an old bone handled knife and whoever it pointed to got to spin it next. It kept us occupied for ages!

nervousseacreature I used to play that with my family. We used to say ‘whoever the knife points to is daft’. I’d completely forgotten about that

Totally outing but my DGF was a keen gardener and had a strawberry glass house. I used to love picking the strawberries for our tea (and felt very important doing so). It was only years later when growing my own plants that my mum told me strawberries can only be harvested once a year and what he used to do was buy a punnet and sew them into the plant for me to pick EVERYTIME we went there.

That’s so lovely sexykitten

Aww geekster I’m happy to meet another knifey player!

@ReggaetonLente I’ve begun laying the groundwork. He is buying it!!

For a long time, I used to exchange letters with a fairy who lived in our garden. I LOVED receiving those letters. I'm sure it's a coincidence, but that fairy had remarkably similar handwriting to my Dad, and often expressed an opinion on what a wise and marvellous parent my Dad seemed to be.

If we were going on a trip with just one of our parents, one of us always sat in the front on the way there and then in the back on the way home.

So I was always in the front on the way there and my brother was in the front on the way back.

Stopped all rows about whose turn it was in the front.

That’s good golde me and my sisters always used to argue over who sat in the front. One of my sisters gets car sick so it was usually her to the disgust of the rest of us! I don’t care where I sit in a car now though.

My mum and dad had a shed at the bottom of the garden with a couple of deckchairs and a table for their newspapers. When my many siblings and I got too shouty/annoying/exhausting they went and sat there for a while with a cup of tea. It was the only place we were never allowed to enter. They could see us playing in the garden through the window so we weren’t abandoned and they navigated the various dramas of our teens by regular visits to the shed which, I suspect, is how they managed to remain remarkably relaxed parents. Now a calm little shed of my own seems very inviting and would probably improve parenting skills mightily.

Ha, I'm sufficiently older than my sister (4 years) that I always got the front seat in those situations. She never complained, though it must have been annoying when we were both leggy teens.

We had "money sucking machines" which were any machines (slots, rides) which had a coin slot which sucked away your money.

My kids loved it and would give any such machine a wide berth.

When my mum was away for a week or more (school trips), and my brother and I were only four or five, she made a big calendar so we could tick off the days until her return. This made us much less anxious, and things were a lot easier for our dad!