May Blossom searching for the truth.
Right now if you were to ask May Blossom to state, for the benefit of the tape, her full name, she would tell you my name. ‘Jessie Withgusto,’ she’d say (except she knows my real surname and you, Internetters, by and large do not). She said this for the first time a few days ago, and I laughed so hard that she has been doing it ever since. We had been working, for several days beforehand, on teaching her to say her full name. She had it down pat and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she changed her name to mine.
What is up with that? I suppose it’s more useful than knowing her own name if she gets lost. She can tell the cops who to call. She’ll be more use to them than Graham Greene was, when as a small child he was lost in Picadilly Circus. When the police found him and asked him to describe his mother, he told them ‘My mother is a proud woman.’
Other areas of the truth on which May Blossom is currently a bit iffy include whether there is a poo in her nappy, or whether there is a sultana up her nose.
A few weeks ago we were driving to breakfast on a Saturday morning, and she was happily eating sultanas in her car seat. Suddenly she exclaimed ‘OW! Nose! ’Tana! Nose, Mummy. ’Tana nose.’ It was pretty clear what was going on. I pulled the car over and got her out, and H and I spent a good ten minutes on the side of the road holding her at funny angles trying to see if there really was a sultana stuck up her nose. They were quite big sultanas and she has a very little nose (not abnormally little or anything, just the right size for her age). There really didn’t seem to be a sultana in the nostril she was complaining about.
Eventually, after calling two friends with kids, one of whom is a doctor, and leaving them fairly insane messages, we made the decision to continue to breakfast and see if the nose was mentioned again. If there really was a sultana up her nostril, I reckoned, a bit of bacon and scrambled egg wasn’t going to be enough to make her forget it, and if she was still complaining about it later we would go to the Emergency Room, which was what the good people of PanicGoogle were mostly recommending. (Did you know there’s a special tab parents can hit marked ‘Panic’? It’s up with the choices ‘Maps’ ‘News’ and ‘Images’ in the Google toolbar.) If, however, there was no more mention of it, we thought it would be safe to assume that this was nothing but May Blossom’s First Lie.
There was no more talk of sultanas in nostrils. It was a hoax. It was her first fib. It won’t be the last. That’s not a milestone you hear much about, but I’m a bit proud of my girl. Of course now we have to teach her that mostly you shouldn’t tell lies, but it’s a pretty big achievement nonetheless.
I’m a terrible liar, and I’m not sure whether to hope she’s better at it than me or worse. Are you any good at lying?