Things have been awfully quiet, here on Life With Gusto. That’s because real life has been a bit hectic. Hectic and befuddling and tiring and wonderful and dreadful. All at once. My kid has decided both taking naps and doing what I say are optional. I’m tired and emotional (which is sadly not, in this case, a euphemism for drunk) and I look and feel like I am gestating the moon.But I’ll be back soon, with a post of substance for you. Or possibly, let’s face it, something insubstantial but very long. In the meantime, for your Friday evening pleasure, here is a picture of May Blossom sitting on Gough Whitlam’s head.
At my parents’ house, where we visit a lot, May Blossom’s chair at the kitchen table is an ancestral wooden seat that’s a bit higher than normal, which is useful for allowing May Blossom to sit at a level where she can shovel pancakes into her gob so fast she is a blur. It belonged to my grandfather’s Aunt Alice, who was a Cripple. History doesn’t relate exactly how she was crippled, but a Cripple she was known as. The chair has a tapestry seat, and every time May Blossom goes to sit in it, Mum says, ‘I must get a proper cover for that’, before covering it with a tea towel depicting the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Now each time she climbs up on the chair, May Blossom, who like many toddlers narrates her entire life life in real time and in the third person, says ‘Now May Blossom sits on Gough’s head.’ It never gets any less funny.
I thought a lot about my future when I was pregnant with May Blossom, but never in my wildest imaginings did I expect to hear a not-quite-two-year-old announce, daily, that she was going to sit on Gough’s head. That’s the kind of surprise I like from parenting.