Tell It!

Day 84: Dec. 9, 2013

My kids like to shout, "TELL IT," at the top of their lungs, usually directed at my husband who has taken a break for breathing from an epic story about super hero's, monsters, aliens, lost space ships, slimy blobs, dinosaurs, trucks (there's always a truck,) Mater and Lightening, princesses and steam rollers. Sometimes all of these elements are involved at once, sometimes only a few. Never just one.

I'm not sure how this all started. At one point my daughter asked me to tell her a story while we were eating lunch, and it was about a boy who woke up in the night and heard giggling in his closet.  He crept down from his bunk bed to find a friendly nightmare burping and after finding this funny, giggling. The story evolved into a much more elaborate tale of singing and dancing followed by epic battles with a scary nightmare who lives in the woods. The boy's name is Mattress.

Then my husband modified this story by setting it at a camp site where a boy and a girl were camping with their parents in the woods. And the friendly nightmare was sitting on a log in a lake and the scary nightmare emerged from behind the camp site making the sounds, "CRUNCH, CRACKLE, CRUNCH."

Crunch, Crackle, Crunch is very big in our family.

Now we're at the point where 99% of the words we speak to our children are in story form. And if we press pause for even a second, we are bombarded with "TELL IT, TELL IT!!!!"

Sometimes this provides us with excellent leverage. Eat your broccoli and I'll tell it. I won't tell it until you go pee and put on some pants.

My husband has become so elaborate and effusive with his stories, that I'm almost off the hook. I am definitely the story telling consolation prize. However, I am the provider of the CDs. Stories told by professional story tellers that we listen to in the car. One of their favorites is called, "Little Dragon." About a little dog sized Dragon who has lost his fire, but nevertheless is jovial and an excellent companion to the little girl who dropped into the story. She discovers that the story world is slowly freezing over as the sun is becoming encased in ice and its up to the little Dragon to climb Dragon Mountain and breath fire into the sun. It's a conundrum because the Dragon has no fire, but deep down, the little girl knows its in him, and how can she help him to find it. She does, and he saves the day. Its very sweet.

My son is really insane about these stories. At one point he demanded that instead of singing lullabies at bedtime, I sing a story about his two favorite characters, Mater and Lightening getting caught in a ditch and fetched out by giant cranes. Once they're out, Mater, Lightening, "the girls," and the cranes all go out for ice cream.  This didn't last very long, mainly because at bed time, I'm tired, totally done, and not in the mood to sing a story.

Coffee: One very early this morning. It feels like that was a week ago.

Watercolor: