Every night I tell Joshua a story.
Well, every night he doesn’t freak out and get it taken away as punishment, but I digress.
When it started, I would make up a story about Thomas the Tank Engine or I would recount the events of some actual Thomas written story or episode he had seen. Eventually this evolved and he would request stories where Thomas was just Thomas doing train things, and then it was Thomas and a fire engine helping save people in emergencies. And then Thomas sort of became this train/fire-engine/jet-powered hybrid who fixed emergencies all on his own. When Joshua saw some Mickey Mouse Clubhouse we would have stories about that crew, or they would visit Sodor Island and hang out with Thomas. And then it became the case that Thomas and Goofy, driving a special Rescue Truck from the Clubhouse, had to be part of every “Fire Truck Thomas” story. And then when Joshua got into Jake and the Neverland Pirates we switched gears and he mostly wanted me to tell him the stories of the episodes he liked, with some originals thrown in. Most recently, he’s started to ask for Superman to make an appearance and has been wondering why we don’t do Thomas and Fire Truck stories anymore (last night Thomas and Superman were flying around trying to find Jake and the Neverland Pirates, Batman showed up unexpectedly in the midst of it all).
This is all to say that story-time is a steadily evolving entity and that Joshua is pretty into it. But it’s gotten a little out of control and I feel like I’m in a bit of a Catch-22.
The wonderful/tricky part about story time is that it’s become something where Joshua gives me a scenario or just tells me what characters he wants involved (Superman and Joshua and Mommy and Daddy but not Matthew because this is Baby Joshua and no Thomas) and then I begin to craft a makeshift story out of it. After I get about a sentence in, though, Joshua takes off running with it. He’ll then begin to just narrate his own tale. He goes off on random tangents and makes sound effects and waves his arms around and gets pretty into it. It’s great. But it also takes a really long time and, let’s not forget, this is a story before bedtime. It needs to have time constraints.
If I try to let Joshua just talk to what sounds like an end and then wrap it up from there, I’m told that he wants me to tell him the story and then I’ll get another line in before he takes off again. Frequently I am corrected if it sounds like I started progressing towards what may be an endgame scenario; I’m told that whatever I just shared didn’t actually happen and something else happened instead. It can be very difficult to make forward progress.
Here’s where the trap comes in: I want to tell Joshua stories because it’s fun. And I want him to get into them and help tell them and have input. But story time has become a sprawling takes-a-long-time-and-amps-him-up affair just when we need him to be winding down to sleep (something he barely gets enough of as it is, despite our best efforts). However, I am loathe to try and constrain his creative impulses. As a writer, my weakness is story. I just can’t ever seem to come up with one. I’ll get ideas, but cannot carry them through or get so paralyzed with choice that I never really start them. It’s the kind of thing I think about every day, but still remain stuck, spinning my wheels. And here I have my son, 3-years-old, ready to just fly and tell stories however he wants to tell them without any doubt or hesitation.
It feels like the wrong move to tell him that he needs to just sit and be quiet and listen to me tell stories to him. He’s already pretty quiet and attentive when we read books, so I know he’s fine just listening to a story. That tells me that he is excited to participate when it’s time to create. The last thing I want to do then is get draconian with him and mandate how he needs to be during his creative time.
What I’ve done for now, which seeeeeeems to have helped a little, is switch the order of things a bit. It used to be that bedtimes stories were the closer. Bath/shower, pajamas, brush teeth, read books, tell stories, lights out. But we have tried swapping books and stories so that he hears stories first and he seems a little more mellow. He participates, but is a little more open to suggestion about what actually does happen next. I’m guessing this is because he knows that the end of the story is not the end of the road. He still has another activity coming up because he gets to read a book. So there’s less incentive for him to keep the story going as long as he can manage.
We’ll see how long it is before he catches on.
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