Detox

My mother-in-law Grandma Elizabeth, has just telephoned to say that she will be arriving on Friday (tomorrow) afternoon for a long weekend. OHMYGOD!

Soon she will pull up outside our home, her enormous old Rolls Royce creaking under the weight of six packs of Fruit Shoots, great multi packs of Monster Munch crisps, Haribo jellies, and those little pastel coloured flying saucer type sweets that are filled with sherbet and feel like polystyrene on your tongue (where does she get them?).

Grandma Elizabeth will no doubt have one of her 'special little gifts' taking up the entire back seat of the car. On her visit last month, she brought a ride on Motorised Thomas Train with its own tracks that took up half of our lawn. What will it be this time, life size stuffed ponies? Soon there will be no room at all for James and I in the house, and we shall be confined to the games room above the garage next to the au pair.

Grandma Elizabeth always finds the children 'hard to handle' when she visits, but then she does insist on feeding them a diet of pure sugar and E numbers. It takes me about seven days to completely detox them after she leaves.

I cannot bear to allow her to take the children to the park anymore. On a previous occasion, I decided to join them all in the park after a dental appointment, and when I eventually found her reading the paper and sipping lemon tea in a quiet corner of the coffee shop, the children were no-where in sight.

"They will return when they are hungry," she cheerily informed me!

"But Freya was not yet four, Max is only five, you should not let them out of your sight," I exclaimed in horror.

"I raised two lovely boys," she said coldly, "and we had The Moors Murderers in my day. The papers exaggerate the danger" she told me dryly turning the pages of her paper.

I frantically searched the park for my darlings, and found Freya at the top of the climbing frame and eventually Max too, helping the man in the bicycle shop on the other side of the park. Yes they were alive, but it was more luck than judgement.

Grandma Elizabeth constantly sends me up for my choice of organic and fresh food and low salt/low fat foods. She throws cups full of salt into my boiling vegetables. James and I are so careful when it comes to salt consumption.

It is so hard to be assertive with my mother in law, I cannot bear it when she complains that the children are swinging from the light fixtures - filled with her E numbered and sugar drenched confections. Fruit Shoots are nothing but rocket fuel for kids, Monster Munch taste vile and cause the children to be monsters. She has no real experience of children, James and his brother were raised by nannies after all!