Another milepost
That’s over, then. Mothering Sunday, that is. Ah, yours may not be. But over here in dear old Blighty, we celebrate Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday in Lent, which was yesterday. (We had it first, by the way! Started in the seventeenth century, when servant boys and girls were allowed a day off to visit their parents and were often given a Simnel cake to take with them. Simnel? An old couple, Simon and Nell, who were always arguing. They wanted to make a fruit cake, which he said should be boiled but she said should be baked. Since they couldn’t agree, they did both.)
We had a few children in church, so I started with a quiz about mothers which I filched off the internet. Questions like, what was the longest interval between siblings produced by the same mother? Answer: an unbelievable 41years! First child born when the mother was nineteen, last born when she was sixty. Or how about this one? The largest number of children born to one woman? Answer: again unbelievably, sixty nine! Several sets of twins and triplets and two sets of quads amongst the brood.
It all made for a bit of fun, but I made the mistake of joking that if I had that many children I’d have to call them by a number, rather than a name. One of our lovely older members came up to me afterwards with tears in his eyes, telling me that he’d been brought up in an institution (Barnardos) where he’d been number twenty five for as long as he could remember. Oops! Shan’t make that mistake again.
There were posies for everyone present in church, made of daffodils and carnations, given out by the children.
When we got home, our eldest daughter and family came over (complete with a bunch of flowers and a bottle of wine – very acceptable) and our son proffered a large box of chocolates, so a good day.
I took a baptism in the afternoon and have decided that baptising the first child in a family is much easier than baptising any subsequent babies. By the time you get to the second child, the first is around three and has many little friends also around three, who shout and yell and run round the church in great glee. Not easy trying to take a baptism under those circumstances.
Still, I live to tell the tale and have another baptism next Sunday afternoon. Happily, that’s a first child. Must be easier. Mustn’t it?
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