The Modern Family WORDS: CHRISTIE NELSON
Family photo credit: Kate Lafferty photography 2021
As the big, white Census envelopes begin to appear in our letter boxes, the radio and television screens are swamped with Government announcements asking us where we’ll be on the Census evening, it’s evident another five years has passed and it’s time to update the country’s statistics yet again. The biggest and saddest irony is, that most of us will be on the couch under stay-at-home orders with not much else to do in the middle of a pandemic apart from a Census form; something certainly not predicted by the Bureau of statistics back in 2016 and not the excitement we were all looking for in 2021.
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I have been having a little giggle to myself about how to complete our questionnaire because our family dynamic is quite fluid depending on where any of the six children are at the time and often, we are a blended family of eight, predominantly semi-blended of five, sometimes three and occasionally, it’s just the two of us. Is there enough room on a form for that? I can tell you firsthand that it makes food shopping a nightmare and if you’re ever thinking of referring to us a ‘nuclear family’, we’ve well and truly created more of an atomic explosion!
