Storytelling

It used to be with my kids that bedtime meant reading them a few stories and then "cuddle" time, which is just another word for fooling around before going to sleep. As I mentioned in my "Bedtime" post the kids now ask for a made up story every night, in addition to the other sleep traditions described earlier. To help anyone trapped in this situation, or if you just want to add another element to your bedtime routine I thought I would share what types of stories the kids seem to like and the ones they don't like.

Magic - Any story with magic seems to be a hit. I've told stories about magic trees, cars, dogs, potato's, beds, pillows, chipmunks and even magic magician's. All the stories are really the same. Two children walking to school, in a forest or playground when they come across the magic object, or in some cases a magician or wizard gives them the magic item. The item can do all kinds of silly magic like turning furniture or toys into play dough or making the family car fly. You can pretty much go anywhere with magic.

Crazy - Anyone or anything that's crazy the kids love. Crazy parents, crazy friends, crazy animals. Whatever, as long as they are crazy. I guess they relate to this pretty well since we as parents are the craziest role models around. If you're really ambitious add magic to crazy and the kids will be bouncing off the walls. Perfect for bedtime as I found out last week....

Prince/Princess - Boring, but always popular.

Animals - Especially if they can talk and do some kind of magic. Though wouldn't you think some kind of magic was already involved if a squirrel could talk.

Food/School/Cleaning up - These are not good stories to tell even if you're trying to get a point across or teach a lesson. You'll waste your time telling it and end up having to tell another story or spend extra time trying to convince them to go to bed.

One other thing that we've recently started to do at bedtime which I think is a pretty good idea is playing a little game with letters. We start with "A" and ask the children to come up with words that start with "A" based on clues. For example: What's red or green, grows in a tree and also is a juice? Apple. I know you don't need the answer, but I felt compelled to answer anyway. We do this for as many "A" words as we and the kids can think of. The next day is "B" and so on. It is a nice way to challenge the children and settle them down before sleep.

Hope these help.

Bedtime Stories

Let me start out by saying that I love my children very much. I have 4 very unique children with 8 unique personalities. There are the times when they are loving, warm and cuddly and say the funniest things...and then there are the times when their personalities no longer belong to them. They are either possessed by demons or this is who they really are. I'm not sure yet which is which, but each day convinces me more that dads have the toughest jobs, not moms. I'm currently unemployed and during the day I look for work with the late afternoons and evenings dedicated to kid time. I won't even go into feeding time in this blog.

After dinner it's time for brushing teeth and reading stories. This went relatively well until I made the mistake of offering one last story while cuddling with my two oldest (6 & 4) children. The other mistake I made was telling a made up story. This has now become an every day occurrence. At first it was kind of fun and making up stories wasn't too hard. There were magic trees and talking chipmunks which the kids thoroughly enjoyed. After a short while though, these were not good enough. They wanted me to incorporate bugs, lollipops, feathers and the color fuchsia. Even after making up one story after another, the rugrats started to complain that the stories weren't funny enough, weren't long enough or just weren't any good. Can you believe that I was agonizing each night, and now sometime during the day about stories that the kids would like and now they're telling me I stink as a storyteller.

I have this book in mind called the grandfather gets even with the kids book where I get even with my children by making their children crazy and then going home. I think the first chapter will be on making up stories and topics your parents will never be able to make up a story about.

Dad