Old-Fashioned Picnic

There’s something pretty special about seeing your daughter running around your old school playground wearing the same dress you wore there yourself 30 years earlier.

My mum likes to keep things so a number of former favs – Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Dolls, as well as clothing - have surfaced over the years, much to mine and my daughter’s delight.

It helped that said dress, white with red trim and spots, interspersed with red apples, still looks brand new. It was for an ‘old-fashioned picnic’ the school was hosting to celebrate winning the environmental and sustainability focus award and to strengthen the shared partnership and relationship building between school and home. Usually in uniform, the children were allowed to come dressed in old-fashioned clothing, bringing an old-fashioned, healthy plate of food and sharing old-fashioned games.

Old-fashioned to me conjured up women in long, layered, petti-coated garments, looking rather sullen, and black and white of course. It didn’t occur to me that the 1980s might seem old-fashioned to my children.

Although slightly disturbed at how, in their minds, I was now on a par with those sullen women from the ‘real’ olden days, I relished the chance to bust out my old (but new-looking) dress for my daughter to don.

With matching red ribbons (again my 30-year-old originals) she skipped off to school with her brothers and when I joined them at lunchtime for the picnic itself, I was surprised to see that most of the other kids had similarly worn clothing from the eighties era.

The tables were groaning with food, much to my horror. You see, the twins hadn’t passed on the message that it was to be a shared lunch and all the other parents had outdone themselves making bread and butter pudding, along with a description of how it was made during the war to utilize every last morsel, a cultural dish from an International student, club sandwiches, pie, fruit kebabs and plenty of home baking.

I sat there shame-faced watching everyone eat this delicious cuisine and sheepishly turning down offers of lunch before the games started and what fun we used to have!

After watching the kids delight in Blind Man’s Bluff with one of the grandads, egg and spoon races and clapping games, to name a few, I recalled and demonstrated some elastics moves before realising I had a few more jiggly bits than back in the day and stopped to catch my breath.

Later, my dress came home intact, apart from a smidgen of red jelly spilt down the front

and it was washed to be put away with the baby outfits passed down from mum, to me, to my daughter. Several of them have a J sewn onto the front: my mum starts with a J, as do I and my daughter and, although it is a coincidence (we’re certainly not emulating the Kardashian’s), I’ve told her that, to carry on the tradition, she, too, has to name her daughter something starting with J, no pressure or anything. I’ve already got a few suggestions.