For the last month or so, The Littlest Critic has been enthralled by the stories I've been telling at bath time.
Over the months shortly after the birth of our daughter, The Wife and I were gifted three purple hippos with yellow inner tubes for the bath. With temperature sensitive letters spelling out "HOT" on their bottoms, these toys informed new parents, idiots that we are, when we ran too hot a bath for our newborns.
The stories featuring these hippos are alternately about three hippo sisters, Cloris, Delores, and Doris or three hippo brothers Boris, Morris, and Norris. The sisters had real, classically constructed stories with an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. The brothers stories were just madcap nonsense about getting cookies off high shelves or playing catch.
In the beginning, there were only the three sisters and their friend, The Green Bear, a bath toy we found last summer trapped in the filter of the public pool that we could not (COULD NOT) leave behind. Other bath toys, such as the Jewel Duck, the Corn Duck, or The Boy and The Girl, could join in the adventures, but it was pretty much a hippo and bear only show.
After a while, I got a little case of writer's block (although what we'd call it in this instance, I don't know) and I began toying with the notion of using classical sources from antiquity when I was trapped. At first, it was hard digging through source material to find the right Greek myths that I could pilfer (like Shakespeare, he said, preeningly), then I stumbled upon the Thousand and One Nights scenario.
This has worked like gangbusters. The three hippo sisters don't want to go to bed. Their daddy, The Green Bear, makes them go through all the required cleaning rituals, then tucks them into bed. The wily sisters, wanting to stay awake, offer to tell their father stories. He, being a bear who enjoys a tale more than most, always acquiesces and lets the three sisters tell one story each.
The first sister usually tells a Three Hippo Brothers story that is some kind of nonsense (though I've lately slipped in some small math problems for the hippos to solve in order to get the cookies or the candy they want). The second sister tells a classic tale. (The night I told a variation on Pygmalion where a lonely hippo makes a statue of a duck to be a friend, a statue that comes to life, the story proved such a hit that I was required to tell it three times in various ways.) The third sister usually tells a very repetitive story about a bee that visits a playground and everything he flies over and around. This last story typically puts The Green Bear Daddy to sleep and the Three Hippo Sisters celebrate their victory by staying up and playing all night.
Ahem. That, my friends, has been the routine for a while now.
Until. Until TLC decided she wanted to take over the storytelling duties. Stepping back from this, having had time to mull it over, I am usually quite pleased that she's shown such an interest in being a storyteller like me.
But, but, but, at the time she does it, I'm really and actually pretty frustrated. Hey! I think, I'm the one telling the story here. I've actually taken time out to make a good parallel, hippo-centric version of the Judgment of Paris. This is real work that I'm putting into these bath time adventures. Now she's going to sidetrack the whole business for her nonsense?
I always let her tell her stories though. They're usually pretty funny. High on nonsense, goofy as all get out, they're like some dadaist prank of a children's book or a trip through the mind of a five year old Dali (incidentally, the last time we visited the Cleveland Museum of Art, this was TLC's favorite picture; while it's not particularly amusing, she thought it a stitch).
All of this, mind you, is just one big preface so I can present to you, unedited, as transcribed by me seconds after its completion, one of the bath time stories, as told by The Littlest Critic. Enjoy.
They all played in the park and they played ping poe pong pango peego. And they hit the baseball right into their mouths, and it was ice cream. It was an ice cream baseball.
And they hit it with a bat! Another one! Another one! Another one! Another ice cream baseball.
And it landed right in the mouth of a lion! And the people saw the teeter totter would be a good way to shoot him up to the sky. And the lion ROARED and he jumped.
The End.
Sophocles better watch out. There's some pretty stiff competition on the way. Oh yeah.
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