10 Next there’s Evangelina, who’s six. We all have names like something out of an opera in my family, so everyone calls her Evi. Is she normal? Noooo. Of course she’s not. She’s what her teachers call a Math Whiz, which means she likes math. And I mean really likes math. When the rest of us are eating ice cream cones and bouncing on the trampoline (or talking to bits of plasticine), she’s working out square roots and drawing factor trees. For fun! I have a six-year-old sister who does math for fun! Oh well; it keeps her out of my very long hair anyway. Younger than Evi are the twins, who are just about to start school. They’re called Amelia and Matilda, but everyone calls them Milly and Tilly. They don’t know yet, but they have a medical condition called dwarfism, which makes them very small for their age. Mum says they’ll encounter stigmas and unkind treatment when they get out in the world, so she’s training all of us to help others see the beauty in each person and not judge others on visible differences. Mum says we’re going to “change the world one person at a time” and help others look past the stereotypes. Milly and Tilly do all the same things as the rest of us, including skating. But more about that later. Did I mention the pets? We have a great drooling, lolloping dog called Bernie. Yes, he is a Saint Bernard. For a family with quite an imagination for human names, we kind of ran out of ideas when it came to the dog. So, the Saint Bernard is called Bernie, but I call him “His Holiness.” We found him abandoned on the riverbank when he was a puppy. He looked really small and fluffy then. Mum said he wouldn’t grow up to be all that big. Mum says a lot of things she
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