Bedtime Stories
After returning from work yesterday evening, I arrived home just in time to tuck the children in bed, and read their bedtime story. Given their inability to agree on any books I proposed, I made a fateful suggestion...
“How about I make a story up?”
“Yeah!”
If there's one thing I am singularly talented at, it's talking rubbish. Within minutes they sat enthralled amid their bedclothes as I spun a story about their friends that live nearby, a fat dragon, chimneys being knocked off houses, pepper pots, dragon snot, and best friend's Mum's clothes being torn off by dragon sneezes.
This evening, I arrived at a similar time, and found myself tucking the children in again.
“Can you make a story up?”
I looked at W, and she looked back with a smile, and her head tipped sideways.
“Oh, go on... you enjoy it really”
And so it was that I found myself being really rather crafty. I spun a story about a little boy called George who always walked past an old bookshop on his way home from school, but never went in because the old man inside was scary. Through a really rather unlikely plot twist (I was getting tired), the boy ended up in the possession of a magic book, that if you thought about anything hard enough while holding, made real.
I left the girls led flat in their beds, with their eyes tightly shut, naming the hundreds of chocolate bars they could see in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.