What We Learned About the Mother on 'How I Met Your Mother'

In the final season premiere of the series, the audience got the first glimpses of the woman Ted eventually falls for

Photo: CBS

Earlier this year, the audience finally met How I Met Your Mother‘s titular star, and on Monday’s season nine premiere, one more person joined that elusive club – just not Ted himself.

Over the course of two back-to-back episodes, Ted’s best friend Lily (Alyson Hannigan) met his dream woman on board a train headed to the fictional Farhampton, Long Island, where Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) are set to wed. It marked the first major scenes for actress Cristin Milioti, who made her debut as the much-anticipated mother in last May’s season finale. As the show progresses towards its series finale in 2014, the audience will continue to learn more about Ted’s as-yet unnamed wife-to-be, but in case you missed it, here’s what we learned on Monday:

1. She’s caring.
Fleeing Ted’s nightmarish road trip itinerary, Lily finds herself alone on a train on the verge of tears at not having seen her husband Marshall (Jason Segel) and son Marvin in a week. She unknowingly mutters some of her inconsolable inner dialogue out loud, but finds comfort in the mother, who comes to a stranger’s aid and presents her with homemade cookies.

2. She has a biting sense of humor.
Speaking of cookies, the mother first jokes that she found the batch under her seat, and later reveals she calls her recipe “sumbitches,” something she admits after Lily happens to refer to the cookies by the same phrase.

3. She’s great at nicknames.
As Lily lists all the irritating quirks that led her to ditch Ted, she and the mother bond over an inability to tolerate slow driving, and how in that situation, the mother would issue a terrible nickname to get someone to speed up. Future Ted (voiced by Bob Saget) explains that she did just that during their courtship: Lady Tedwina Slowsby.

4. She’s not above eating food out of her bra.

Longtime fans of the show know that any female who attempts to join the group has to earn the approval of Ted’s best buddies, and the mother showed she can hang with the best of ’em when, in one of the show’s sweetest moments, a flash-forward showed her and Ted on their one-year anniversary trip, and the mother admitted to fishing for crumbs out of her bra – a moment Ted cheekily described as hot.

5. She calls Ted out on his crap.
In later seasons of the show, viewers have seen more of Ted’s pretentious qualities come to light, such as his penchant for correcting other people’s pronunciation. The mother proved she won’t stand for it, teasing her future husband about his tendency to haughtily show off his word-deduction technique when filling out crossword puzzles.

While Ted still has a season to go before he ultimately meets his soulmate, fans, no doubt, are already smitten.