I loved Mummy’s sense of humour but my favourite part about this book had to be Edward. Especially the showdown with Jane when Mummy insists on buying Jane a giant roasting dish when Jane moves to university as she may at some point want to make a roast chicken in a roast chicken emergency. After a long day at work this was the book I wanted to read because it made me laugh out loud, chuckle and generally made me smile. This will definitely be an eventful year for Mummy, no wonder she’s partial to a drink. The book follows Mummy’s life in a year and each chapter represents a month and what happens in her life. However, she still has time to see Hannah one of her oldest friends and babysit Hannah’s 2 year old son Edward, who gives new meaning to the term ‘the terrible twos’. Throw in some changes at work and Mummy’s plate is full to bursting. She is now separated from her husband Simon and going through the process of a divorce. Jane is studying for her A Levels and hoping to go to university and Peter is studying for his GCSEs. Her children Jane and Peter are now older.

When we first meet Ellen (Mummy) she is waiting to take her daughter, Jane to her driving test. She’s feeling overwhelmed and under appreciated, and the only thing that Mummy knows for sure is that the bigger the kids, the bigger the drink. And despite her best efforts, her precious moppets still don’t know the location of the laundry basket, the difference between being bored and being hungry, or that saying ‘I can’t find it Mummy’ is not the same as actually looking for it.Īmidst the chaos of A-Levels and driving tests, she’s doing her best to keep her family afloat, even if everybody is set on drifting off in different directions, and that one of those directions is to make yet another bloody snack. Mummy has been a wife and mother for so long that she’s a little bit lost. I have literally never stood wistfully in the supermarket and thought ‘Oh, how I wish someone was trailing behind me constantly whining ‘Mummy, can I have, Mummy can I have?’ while another precious moppet tries to climb out the trolley so they land on their head and we end up in A&E.

And despite the busybody old women who used to pop up whenever I was having a bad day and tell me I would miss these days when they were over, I don’t miss those days at all. It genuinely never occurred to me when they were little that this would ever end – an eternity of Teletubbies and Duplo and In The Night Bastarding Garden and screaming, never an end in sight.īut now there is. I just wanted them to stop wittering at me, eat vegetables without complaining, let me go to the loo in peace and learn to make a decent gin and tonic.

Gill sims why mummy