My parents are mad (lighthearted)

[FellOutOfBedTwice]

Okay so it's 4.30am and I can't sleep because my parents are quite mad.

I am pregnant and suffering from morning sickness as well as having had some bleeding for the last couple of weeks. My husband is away with work this week and when me and toddler DD caught heavy colds it became clear that I couldn't look after us both, so we've come to stay with my (very lovely, it has to be said) parents.

They live a three minute drive from us so we never ever stay. As such I haven't been here overnight- aside from one Christmas when I got pissed some years ago and the night before my Nans funeral- since I left for uni.

In that 15 years my parents seem to have gone a bit potty in a way that I didn't notice without staying over.

Examples-

• the broadband gets switched off at bedtime (ie 10pm). When I queried this, my Dad said its a fire hazard. Do people do this? Our broadband has been on constantly since we moved into our house in 2010. How would it record sky otherwise?!
• bedtime, as mentioned, is 10pm. Like a weird lodging house from 1973 we are all expected to have retired to our room by then.
• I am in the spare room, in the spare bed. I noticed that the bed was a bit short. My feet touch the footboard. When I queried this my Mum said "your Dad sawed the end off to shorten it. He doesn't like a long bed." WHAT?! He's not a tall man- 5ft 9ish- but that's mental. I'm 5ft 8... I don't think anyone much taller could sleep in it. The room is not small and my Dad doesn't routinely sleep in it, so he's ruined a bed for no reason.
• my Mum has a washing turn around time of maybe 2hours from washing basket to ironed. Honestly, it's mental. She asked if I had anything of mine and DDs to wash. Gave her a pile of washing and it was back and clean and pressed on my bed within two hours tops.
• we had to sit in silence for the duration of Midsomer Murders.
• despite being absolutely filthy rich, they don't have sky upstairs, decent toiletries (I'm talking Tesco Value Hair Spray) or contract mobiles (they burn through credit like 13 year old girls in 2001) because "there's no need".
• when my morning sickness struck I wandered into the kitchen and asked my Dad what the had that was "plain, dry and maybe crunchy" ie a cracker or rich tea biscuit. After much hunting the only thing in their kitchen that even touched that description was some celery. They had just had their shopping delivered but tend to "not eat snacks" said my Dad. There's not eating snacks and then there's just being weird.

Parents are mid sixties and clearly barking.

Tell me I'm not alone.

I rant about this constantly so it serves me right if it outs me, but: my mum lights the gas hob with a match because the ignition has stopped working. Next to the hob she has a little cup with a box of matches in it. The dead matches go in the cup, so that next time she is lighting the second or third ring, she can use the dead match as a spill instead of wasting a whole new match.

They have a teapot with a rather blocked spout (tannin, scale etc) and it takes a long time to pour each cup. One day I started pouring the tea and was taken aback to find the tea positively flooding out. "what's happened to the teapot?" I gasped. It turns out that it was a second teapot, identical to the first, but new, which they got because the first one was blocked. but they hardly ever use it. They keep it in a cupboard. For special occasions. And use the blocked one. (honoured to be a special occasion though)

When my mum comes to see me she brings a little pack of "interesting" things that she has saved up to discuss with me. Last time it was:

The order of service from their parish priest's funeral (to be fair, I did know him);
An advertorial in a local paper which was a local solicitor pointing out that death is complicated if you are not married and have a family (she thought it was an article, but it was not, and had no actual advice in it);
various things about various children's concerts;
anything in any press about anyone who went to my school (to be fair we did not go to a very high powered school so this is actually worthy of comment)

DM is in her 60s, runs her own business and has an iPhone 6. However....

She is obsessed with closing all internal doors.

She makes her own curtains. These are often quite eccentric. For example, she made her bedroom curtains by buying some furry "bumble bee stripe" pattern material from the local market. Then instead of curtain rails, on each side of the window she hung several pairs of parallel hooks. You "draw" the curtains by hanging them on the top hook so they reach from the top to bottom of the window. Or, you can have them half-drawn by using the hooks halfway down, so the curtains start halfway down the window. Etc. this is apparently called "modular" curtains

She randomly makes up names for people. She calls her NDN dog "Leroy" despite the fact that that is not his name, and calls my sister's favourite pop group "that mouse band".

She wears long undies all year round and if she doesn't like a piece of art, will say "it makes me feel queasy".

My Dad doesn't understand how to delete or use any punctuation when writing a text message. He also lets me know it's him twice per message. He'll send something like 'hi its dad are you free tomotow I mean tomorrow love you dad'.

RevoltingPeasant out of interest, who are "that mouse band"?

MIL carefully fashioned a box of tissues to cover the separate caller ID that was by the hall phone as she didn't want friends or family to know she had it and was ignoring their calls.
Also turns off everything.
Uses tea bags at least twice yet is certainly not hard up.
FIL refused to take the sat nav on holiday in case someone stole it from his car. Instead it was locked in their safe at home (hidden and disguised as a shoe rack), whilst he relied on an ancient AA map book to reach the destination. In fact, so paranoid was he that sat nav would be stolen he never actually took it in the car and only ever used it as he walked to the next village.

Modest Mouse modestmouse.com

In full agreement about the obsessive recycling!

The inlaws moved house and the previous owner had chucked absolutely everything into the recycling bin. The result was that the bin men refused to take it. The inlaws' rather charming response was to write formal letters of apology to the council and to the bin men themselves, explaining the errors of the former owner and promising that in future their recycling bin would be treated with the respect it deserves.

Clearly they treat this promise extremely seriously.

On one occasion when we stayed with them, DH carelessly and thoughtlessly placed a single small plastic bag full of the wrong type of recycling into the recycling bin. MIL is a very small lady, about 4'10". The recycling bin is, well, wheelie bin sized. Very large. MIL climbed into the wheelie bin to reclaim the small bag of the wrong recycling, and DH was not spoken to for the next 24 hours.

My late gran used to flick on a random switch on her hob, then used the palm of her hand to pat each ring to find the hot one.
She had constant burn marks.
She'd never go past Channel 5 on her remote in case she couldn't get back to BBC1.
She'd save tea bags for the next cup by pegging them up on a little string above the sink.
She lived to 104; when I reminded her of her age and that she'd lived in 3 different centuries, she'd say "well don't be telling anyone else that; they all think I'm in my 70s!

I have nothing to add but this is wonderful

3cats that is so sweet! ('they all think I'm in my 70s'). My MIL is a bit like that. Clients say to her "Ooh- you wait till you're my age"... not realising she's already 15 years older than them

One of mum and dad's window in their house was tiny. My dad was absolutely paranoid about 'a very tiny burglar' getting in and stealing their extensive collection of Whimsey ornaments. I told them on many occasions that this was highly unlikely on account of the fact that the window was approximately 10 inches in diameter and on the top floor of the house.

I'll also never forget the look on DH's face when my dad waltzed in with DH's takeaway pizza slung under his arm like a book, so he had a completely bald pizza. He spent the next 10 minutes trying to scrape the topping from the inside of the box.

God I miss my parents, not only were they the nicest people on the planet, they were comedy gold.

Both DM and PIL switch of everything.

But DM also has an odd habit of bringing her own sheets and pillow when she comes to stay.

No duvet or duvet cover though.

I provide freshly washed bedding and four pillows but clearly they are wrong.

She says she doesn't want to give me extra washing.

This thread is just brilliant! Since I posted yesterday about my lovely Dad, I have thought of some other bonkers things. My Irish Catholic Nan used to go to the church services of weddings and funerals of people she didn't know. When asked about whose wedding or funeral she'd attended she'd get all sniffy and say "I don't know, but it was a beautiful feckin' service" :-D. I also remember one year when she had gone on and on about not having a "decent set of luggage". So my parents bought her a really lovely set of Samsonite luggage for Christmas to which she responded "what do I need feckin' luggage for, I go nowhere, see no-one"....

I still cringe about a date I had when I was 15 my daughter would never have been allowed to do this ever in a million years. A very wealthy young man who drove a Porsche at 17 and took me to the Hippodrome in London (despite my age ) and a lovely West End restaurant. He drove me home and walked me down the drive, went in for a kiss at which point my Dad flung open the front door, dragged me in virtually by the scruff of the neck, said "thank you very much" and slammed the door. I was horrified. He had been standing by the spy hole for God knows how long. Weirdly, a second date didn't materialise....!! My Dad said that he'd saved me from "Greeks bearing gifts". FWIW, he wasn't Greek and didn't bring a gift .

Lastly, my lovely late Mum. She had a very close relationship with her sister who was 10 years younger. When my Mum died, my Aunt helped me with the difficult task of clearing out her many wardrobes. As we were pulling things out, Aunt was saying "that's mine, oh and that's mine, she was a cow" and laughing. Turned out that every time my Aunt had had a clearout and had bags ready for Oxfam, my Mum used to "volunteer" to drop them off, and keep the lot! What was a really difficult day descended into tears of laughter. Oxfam won out in the end....!!!

Whatamess, I cried reading about the pizza !!

at "it was a beautiful feckin service"

Also the grandma with the Formica countertop....

My DH is soooo going to go this way. He's fairly anal now at 46 so God help me by the time he gets to 60!

My df announced during Sunday tea tonight

"I have decided I'm going to create my own puddings. They shall be bastardisations of other people's recipes"

It turns out that basically he's just going to soak a lot of fruit in port and put them in various cakes. His new favourite thing is soaking fruit in port. Baked apples soaked in port stuffed with sultanas soaked in a different port were interesting to say the least. Then he put one in a freezer bag for me to take home "for later....Don't tell your sister"

Starkey well that's a brilliant anecdote. How bizarre. Maybe they'll be seasonal? Spring- rhubarb in port. Summer- pineapple in port. Autumn- pears in port. Christmas- satsumas in port...?

Oh god fellout I hope not! Thing is, df is actually an amazing cook, but he does love to experiment, with varying results! I'm not going to forward your suggestions on as I can guarantee next Sunday we'd be faced with port soaked pineapple upside down cake with chardonnay custard or something! He actually made pears in port a couple of weeks ago! But they kept going mushy apparently...so he made it into pear port crumble!

Love this thread! My granny had a mobile phone (never switched on obviously) with an address book permanently strapped to it with an elastic band. She would make cream of tomato soup by making a cup a soup and adding squirty cream on top.
Being a passenger in my other granny's car was the most terrifying experience. She could barely see where she was going and would beep at everyone for no discernible reason, e.g. Yes they're walking on the pavement but they may be thinking about stepping into the road. She also left the very formal answer machine messages as if she were talking to an operator, e.g. This is Mrs xx, I would like to leave a message for my granddaughter miss xx
MIL on FaceTime is always hilarious. She always has to FaceTime not just ring and we rarely get to see more than a square inch of her face. one FaceTime she kept complaining that she couldn't see herself. We were trying to say it was us she was supposed to see but she just wanted to make herself bigger and was getting really cross with it!

Love cluckingham palace

I absolutely love this thread.

HowBadIsThisPlease
My parents have a very annoying dribbly shower. you stand in it, cover yourself in shampoo and soap, and then take about 45 minutes trying to get it off by distributing individual drops over water one by one over your body, centimetre by centimetre. This despite having had the bathroom done relatively recently.
I was horrified (and yet somehow not at all surprised) to find out from my sister that there is nothing wrong with the water pressure, and the new shower was fitted with a really good shower head that produced powerful jets. It was taken off and replaced with this one that barely seeps water "to prevent flooding the bathroom if water escapes".

You could always take your own shower head next time you stay.......

You know those sinks that have a tiny draining sink just big enough for a tea cup next to them? My gran always used that sink for washing up to "save water". She would only use the big sink when there was a big family meal - although her definition of a big family meal meant more than 8 of us (we still had to use the small sink for that).

Also one day a scout came to the door to collect milk bottle tops for some project (this was a long time ago) probably expecting to get half a dozen or so. My grandad gave him bags and bags of them! Turned out he had been waiting for this moment for years!