A Story

On Friday, Trombone decided that a fun thing we could do after nap/quiet time would be to write a book. It would be about Iron Man. Friday afternoon after nap/quiet time, the boys went immediately into their afternoon routine of jumping off the couch and pretending the floor was a swimming pool and hitting each other with pillows and running screaming across the house while I tried to make pizza. Such serene tasks as book-writing were forgotten.

Yesterday when he got up from nap/quiet time, Trombone said, “We still haven’t written my book.”

I said, “True.”
He said, “We can do it now.”
I said, “Let me get some tea. And I will help you.”

While I was getting my tea, he stood in the living room and stared at me.

“I’m still waiting” he said.

I’m afraid I was less than kind to him at that point, but I apologized.

Once I had my tea, I cut a stack of 8.5 / 11 paper in half and stapled each stack into a book. Of course, Fresco needed a book too, even though he was more interested in singing endless loops of whatever the hell that song is that he sings.

“The title is Iron Man’s Adventures,” said Trombone.
I wrote that down.
“Now we should draw Iron Man,” said Trombone.
I traced our little one-armed Iron Man figurine. He looked very muscular.

Trombone told me the story and I wrote it down. We shared the work of illustrating. There are things he can draw – like exploding planets and rocketships and bad guys, he’s very good at bad guys. And then there are things he thinks I can draw (but actually I cannot) like superheroes; Iron Man and Superman in this case.

I wrote “The.” He wrote “End.”

“I wrote a book!” he exclaimed, “let’s read it! Right now!”

So we read it. He smiled the whole way through.
“I wrote a book!”
“You sure did!”

This morning, he got out of bed and grabbed his Iron Man’s Adventures book from his pillow.

“I remembered my book” he said.
“That’s good,” I said.
“Maybe now we can write another one.”

I’m going to get on the trite bus for a minute. Here, I saved you a seat. Imagine if all of us created that way? We have an idea. We get right on acting on the idea. We ask for help with the parts we can’t do. We look our creations over and love them. We show them to anyone who will look. We sleep with them next to us. And the next day, we don’t regret, or feel silly, or think “I wish it was better.” We just want to do it again because it was so much fun and it felt so good.

Something to work on.