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

My sister wanted to catch a fairy, so she tied a piece of string around her tooth and around her finger. The next morning there was no money, but a note in very spiky writing from “Narcissus”, our family’s tooth fairy. He had come to collect her tooth, but luckily had spotted the string in time as if his wings had got tangled he would have DIED. From then on, every tooth that was collected had a coin and a note from Narcissus, telling us that our tooth was going to carved into a toy for the fairy princes or princesses, or, occasionally, that we needed to up our game at brushing. I still have my notes (which Dad wrote left handed)

Mum made some plum jam with plums from the Victoria plum tree in our garden. We all said yuk, we don’t like plum jam. So mum put it away until we had forgotten about it. She then reintroduced it as apricot jam and we all loved it.

Am I the only kid who was made to believe frozen peas were icy sweets?

In summer I’d beg for a small handful, and my parents would make a big show of making me earn them, and savour them!

They were anti-sugar way ahead of the trend. I can only hope they watched me eat them, I’m sure they were a bit of a choking hazard at 3 and 4!

My dad used to take us to school on his way to work.
One day he forgot to drop us off, because we happened to be being quiet, and just drove to work. Obviously we thought that was brilliant, and often stayed really quiet in the hope that he'd forget again!
Not sure if he did it on purpose...

I also remember my sister telling my dad that polystyrene peanuts were a new kind of cheesy wotsit. He pretended to eat them and she was horrified.
We tried once telling him that guinea pig poos were liquorice tic tacs... He pretended to eat them too and we really believed him!

My late Dad was a bit of a joker. He once told me about the day at work he was queuing for pudding and his friend got the last helping of chocolate ice cream, which Dad had wanted. His friend gave a sort of half-hearted shrug to apologise but Dad said it was fine.
He got a bowl of vanilla ice-cream and squirted a load of brown sauce into it, stirred it around and ate a spoonful, proclaiming it "just as nice".
His friend, disgusted, left his pudding untouched.
Dad reached across, got the chocolate ice cream he'd wanted in the first place.
I asked him what the brown sauce/vanilla combo tasted like. Apparently it was "bloody awful."

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