Do you have any family sayings, words or phrases that are unique to yourselves, local dialect appropriated for your use, in-jokes and the like? These are great inspirations for a LO - write about how they came to be - or if you can't remember, just journal how these words are something that makes your family unique.
Here are two of mine:
Mouldywarps
My brother and youngest sister were, for some reason, known as the "Mouldywarps". There were four of us, so we split into pairs, the two older ones - the "girls" - and the two younger ones. Mouldywarp is apparently a dialect word for mole (though I must admit I always thought the Mouldywarp was a mole CATCHER)
What's odd is that in the next generation my son was fascinated by moles. It must be something about the boys in my family... With my son it was because of the story One Snowy Night by Nick Butterworth - you'll have to read it to find out why! He has a much loved mole puppet or two and several mole china figures (Molennium...)
In E. Nesbitt's The House of Arden a contemporary boy, Edred, must be tested before he can become Lord Arden and restore the family fortunes. He meets the Mouldiwarp (a mole who appears on the family coat-of-arms).
Perhaps there are more mouldywarps around than I realised! But there isn't yet (at time of writing) a Wikipedia article about it.
Knickering the elephant
OK, it's a strange thing to say - but you'll see what I mean when I explain...
The bigger the duvet you have on your bed, the more difficult it is to change its cover. How do you do it? Do you dive inside? Turn it inside out and grab the corners? Get someone to help you - especially if it's a king-size?
This is such an awkward task that one of my parents (who might have thought it up or might have read or heard it somewhere) declared that it was "as difficult as trying to put knickers on an elephant".
So if you're in our house and someone asks you to "come and help me knicker the elephant", you will know what it means!
Go on, journal your own family words and phrases. It hardly even needs a photo, although the one to go with "knickering the elephant" should be quite interesting!
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