noted on Wed, 24 Mar 2004
Story Time With My Daughter
I have recently begun a new bedtime tradition with my daughter. After I tuck her in with lights out, she asks me to tell a story out of my head.
So I decided that this was an excellent opportunity to practice my impromptu storytelling skills. She knows I’m making this up, because she’ll tell me who (or what) she wants in the story. I have to somehow weave them into the story and make it somewhat good too. Oh, I also always put her in as the main character of the story. Sounds pretty neat, doesn’t it?
I suck at this.
However, I’m not especially concerned. After all, she’s almost 3, and as yet is pretty undiscriminating. If my story is really lame and short, she’ll patiently ask for another one. This means I get to practice, and hopefully in a few months I might actually be pretty good at improvising a story on the spot.
A recent not-very-lame story I managed to eke out is told as follows.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a big castle. This girl is the most beautiful in all the land, and she was a princess! Her name was...
and I used my daughter’s name. She always gets a kick out of this.
Now, the princess had a best friend, Cassie, with whom she loved to play. One day, Cassie took the princess up to the tallest tower in the castle. As they stepped outside, they could see for miles around as the wind blew through their hair. Cassie said, “Princess, would you like to fly today?”
… at this point, I look at my daughter, who considered the notion, and indicates she would in fact like to fly.
So Cassie called out, “Eagles, eagles! Come to me! We wish to fly today!” And two giant eagles came flying to the top tower of the castle. Cassie and the Princess got on the eagles, and they took off.
At this point, I talk about how they could see all kinds of things from the sky, and the eagles did loop-de-loops, and they flew under, over, then through the clouds, and they all had lots of fun.
The eagles then flew back to the tower to drop Cassie and the Princess off, and Cassie said, “Thank you, eagles!” The eagles replied, “You’re welcome! We had lots of fun, and we hope to play again! Would you call on us next time you want to fly?”
I then looked at my daughter to see what opinion she had on the matter, and she said she’d love to. So I made some closing remarks, and wrapped up the story.
As you can see, not the greatest story ever, but I was really excited about the way it was set up. Hopefully I can come back to this and develop it a bit more.