Thanks, Aunty Dee, for coming to the funny farm

I'd better look truth in the eye and say that the day Aunty Dee finds out about this blog is inching closer by the minute.

Mostly thanks to everyone in this house shooting off their mouths about mummy's blogging habit.

But it could also be something to do with the way I am stacking up high horses and orange crates all over this house before climbing on board, raising one finger in rhetorical pose and subjecting anyone around me to a forty-five minute lecture on why Graham Badman is a Balls lackey and why that is not just my opinion. Ending it with the instruction not to take my word for it but you go read those blogs out there! is possibly the wrong thing to do to maintain complete invisibility.

So I had better take the opportunity to say here and now, publicly, that Aunty Dee, you are the best sister in law that anyone could ever have. And I am not just saying that because you know the incriminating stuff.

You are ridiculously patient with us all, even when we do not deserve it, and even though we treat you badly and throw mice at you. You are generous, big hearted, thoughtful and wise, and you have an uncanny sense of what it is like to live in a house stuffed with triplets. Possibly because of your own past experiences there, but they have served you well and made you into a wonderful person to be fought over by Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.

I am truly proud to call you my sister in law, and you honestly feel more like a sister to me. However, I won't follow that through because then I would have married my brother and that is wrong and creepy.

But thank you today for coming to the farm with us and spending hours in unpaid back-breaking fruit-picking labour.

And, this time, we promise not to wait until you go home before eating all the raspberries.

You see? This is a measure of her loyalty.
Even though we push her into the middle of a field, shouting That way!
she keeps on coming back.