doing stories

I present to you 2010's most triumphant innovation in our family's world of creative play: a baking dish filled with dry beans and lentils for Gabriel's tiny construction vehicles to dig and dump. He has spent countless happy hours engrossed in his construction-themed tales, operating the machinery and adding new props to this Pyrex dish-turned-portable theater like shells, acorns, and plastic animals.

And this is The Cup, home to many delightful creatures including horses, dinosaurs, a wiggly snake and a diminutive Spider Man who is in a permanent crouch, forever ready to spring into action. All of them are willing actors. Sometimes when we are in the kitchen together Gabriel will tell me that he'd like to do some stories. I take down the play dough and The Cup off the shelf, and he gets busy making play dough islands, trucks, and roads and populating them with the cup inhabitants who invariably fight, build, and wreck stuff.

That's what my kids do. They do stories. Nowadays Frances like to use paper, pens, and art supplies to do hers, but she still likes a good satisfying round of play dough storytelling too. She tells stories to her pals, the embroidered birds on the shower curtain, every time she uses the bathroom (if you are ever visiting us and wondering where Frances has disappeared too, that is the first place to check). She spends long stretches of time lost in making books featuring protagonists with names like Scary McSee. 

Sometimes I feel like my job is to create an environment that will facilitate my kids' storytelling and story-listening, and then get out of the way. Put out a dish of split peas in a quiet room and let them go at it.  When they tire of that we can read a stack of books together. I am just as hooked as they are; one of the greatest joys of parenting small children for me is the daily consumption of children's books. (It is unfortunate that the pleasures of reading aloud are usually reserved for librarians, teachers, and parents of younger children. I hope my kids will indulge me and tolerate reading aloud together til college. And beyond.)

When my kids do stories, I watch them become pint-sized masterminds controlling a tiny universe, creating and destroying at will. How satisfying! Story making is a kind of counterweight to the relative powerlessness they cope with in a universe run by adults with their maddeningly arbitrary ways. I like to think it gives them a sense of agency in the big wide confusing world, just as it did - and still does (hello blogging!) for me.