As some of you may be aware, I am currently overseas and inviting guest bloggers to come over to Mumchic and share some of their wonderful words with us. I hope that you all thoroughly enjoyed the lovely  Lucy Curtis’ blog on Life As A Work Of Art the other day. Lucy, we loved having you, thankyou !

Today, we are hosting for a second time and with great pleasure friend and journalist Kate Dzienis of the Skinny Cap Two Sugars blog. Kate says she doesn’t do humour but this blog had me laughing to pieces! Good on you Kate and thankyou once again for starring on Mumchic!

Over to you !

Our Lonely Basket For All The World To See – Tale Of Parental Shame.

We’ve all grown up with those embarrassing moments our parents force upon us – mum tagging along to your school social dance and really getting jiggy with it or dad running through the supermarket aisles with a trolley at full speed into a wall of toilet paper.

Perhaps those moments were just mine…?

In any case, enter me and my younger brother Matt, all grown up and ready for some payback. And it’s even better now that I can blog about it to an audience and text her, “Ma, check out Mumchic’s blog…surprise!” .Today is the day I relay one particular embarrassing moment, which I’m fully aware my mother will never forgive us for – but laugh she will.

Every Easter on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, it’s customary in our culture to create a beautiful basket with ribbons and fill it with food to include sausages, horse radish, bread, salt, decorated eggs, butter, ham, cheese, sprigs of greenery and a statue of a lamb.As a family, you go to church to get all the food blessed and then enjoy it together for Easter Sunday breakfast. I’m not quite sure if Matt and I insulted our own heritage but we had a big old laugh about our basket this year.

For the past ten years, mum has always forced me and my brother to go to church for the blessing of the basket by ourselves – I’m going to admit here, neither of us are practising Catholics but once or twice a year, we appease the religion and do what we’re told (even at the ages of 31 and 23).

This year, however, we forced mum to come with us – and we’re pretty sure she’s still regretting it.

Firstly, we elaborated a little bit on our basket.

As a token of the random things throughout mum’s house, we placed an Irish Spring bar of soap, a potato, packet soup and packet beef stroganoff sauce, a can of German sauerkraut, two containers of reduced-in-price-for-quick-sale cherry tomatoes and unwrapped meat.

Left: What a traditional basket is supposed to look like. Right: Me and my brother’s basket.

That’s right folks, we didn’t even unwrap the ham or sausages.

Mum was so embarrassed with our basket that she dutifully attempted to cover it with a scarf but when we parked the car and began walking to the crowd of eastern European church goers, mum was given the honour of carrying the basket with my brother running up behind her to steal the scarf for the world to see what we had.The woman didn’t even want to have anything to do with placing our delightful basket on the blessing table (note: the ceremony is held outside the church).Needless to say, Matt proudly and strategically placed it to sit alone and in full view of the crowd.

The laughter didn’t stop there; in fact, it got louder between us naughty siblings as mum pretended she didn’t understand English and quickly walked away from us whenever we attempted to get to her.Alas, the blessing ceremony ended and Matt collected our decadent basket with honour, the two of us approaching strangers to show off our canned sauerkraut and packet soup, asking for advice on how to make them properly.

People actually thought we were being serious.

While mum walked ahead of us back to the car, her head down in shame, we attempted to get her attention crying out “Prosze pani!”, which is “Excuse me, lady,”.

The funniest part? People actually stopped her to tell her there were two people yelling after her with their arms in the air.

Oh, the fun we had that Easter weekend. Can’t wait to do it all over again !

And now your turn. Have you ever had an experience where your child has well and truly embarrassed  you in company? Or have you, like Kate hatched a bit of a payback plan of your own?

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