Or Little Richard and Big Richard.
These lovely lions were presented as gifts to the Captain when he was born. The little one came from my brother and the big one from my sister in law. Cute as they are the Captain only ever had a passing interest in them. The little one however adores them and yes, they are both named after Richard the Lionheart.
The reason for this post is partly to document the presence of Big and Little in our lives. If you ask the little one who he loves, he will invariably name Big and Little first. He talks to them, carries them around with him, rubs his face into them and if I insist on washing one (or if it is a particularly disastrous) both of them, he has been known to sit in front of the washing machine ensuring that they emerge safely. Lucky for him we have a front loader with a 15 minute cycle and a lovely viewing window.
Big and Little are well travelled, having joined us on all family getaways. One eventful trip to Melbourne even saw Little left behind on the City Circle Tram. We managed to console the distraught child with a hastily concocted story that Little had gone off on an adventure and that he would be back shortly. Consoling the distraught mother was not so successful. I rang everyone I could think of trying to get the original Little back and then conceding defeat started to concoct ever more fanciful stories for the boys about what Little was up to on his adventures.
A few weeks later, the little one came to me and said, "Mamma it is time for little to come home!" Oh the guilt! He had even taken to pointing at every train we passed, in his mind trams were obviously trains, and asking if that was the one that Little was on. Fortunately, this heartbreak came to an end very quickly. We were on a shopping trip with my parents, when my Dad whispered to me, there is a shop here that has the right size Little's, should I go buy one? oh yes!!!
My Dad went and bought him while we were having lunch and placed him discreetly in the little one's pram. The Captain spotted him first, shrieking "little's back" and then loudly announcing, "he looks different." The Captain was no match for Mummy however:
"Well, clearly Little was desperate for a holiday. Look how fabulous he looks now that he has had a decent break and he probably squeezed in a few trips to the day spa as well. Of course, he looks fabulous now! His hair has even grown back!"
The little one bought it! Nowadays these two lions are guarded almost as carefully as the two children. If you look closely in the above photo you can see that Little even gets to use the infants attachment seatbelt on a plane. Safety first people!
The reason for this post though is
this post, on this lovely
blog. I showed the photos to the little one and said "look this little girl has a Richard too, although she hasn't cut her Richard's hair by the looks of things!" "No, Mummy, that is me when I was a baby" he kept insisting. I gently tried to convince him that there was someone else out there with a Richard but he was outraged by the concept of this. It ended up triggering a tantrum of fairly phenomenal proportions! Now, a month later he keeps asking about the little girl with the different Richard!
