Dublin Opinion

I’m not given to personal reminiscences on this blog but this amused me this morning. The personalities of your children only develop slowly as they grow and being so close to your kids you often don’t notice a particular trait until it suddenly, dramatically comes to fore.

So this morning, while walking my little girl to school (who is at pains to tell me that she’s a big girl now) I got the usual demand for an extended fictional narrative to make the short journey between our front door and school all the shorter.

She’s only three and a half, so she didn’t say ‘can I have an extended fictional narrative please, Daddy’. Oh no, I got the abrupt ‘Story, Daddy’ command as soon as we’d stepped out the gate. So I made one up about the cartoon characters Super Ted and Spotty building a family of extra large snow people when the icy form of percipitation was thick on the ground.

This did the trick as I’ve learned from experience that the best children’s stories rely on a repeating pattern of events. Variety is introduced by altering the subjects in the story such as farm animals or the members of a family, or by changing the objects, such as bowls of nourishing oatmeal, chairs and beds. But the activity must remain the same or be similar to the previous one.

For example, the Three Little Pigs involves three members of the same family building a house each and then each in turn receiving an unwelcome visit from a snarlly wolf; Goldilocks and Three Bears depicts the consumption of three bowls of porridge, the disturbance of three pieces of sitting room furniture and the rumpling three different beds.

So my snow people story involved the construction, by Super Ted and Spotty, of four members of the snow people family, Father (huge), Mother (large) little sister (small but still a big girl) and baby (who sucks on a pacifier made of snow). In my story I’d got as far as explaining how Super Ted, because he has the power of levitation – if you’re not familiar with the cartoon character, he’s a teddy bear with super powers and sports a red cape – was hovering at the head of the snow father fashioning eyes and a mouth with pieces of coal.

However, at this point, my little ‘big’ girl interjected:
“And then Super Ted’s cape came off and he fell to the ground!”

“What?”, I said, but then picking up the beat “Yea, Super Ted lost his cape, landed on the snowy ground with a splat and hurt his arm”

This produced a big grin on the face of the little big girl. So I continued with the story, explaining how Super Ted whirled a big woolen scarf around the neck of the snowman.

But she interjected again: “Actually, his cape came off again and he fell down”.

“Okay, so…his….cape…comes off….AGAIN…and he falls on to the wet snowy ground with a super splat. Did he hurt his arm again?”.

“No”, she said, with a bright wide grin on her face, “this time he hurt his leg”.