Story Time

The other night, my wife was out of the house and I was getting ready to put M. Edium to bed. He normally gets five books a night, fewer if one of them is particularly long. Frequently he requests a specific book by title. He did so on this night, but not by title. Rather, it was by plot summary:

"The mean book with the monster who has claws and jail and the friends fight."

You know what book that is? Neither did I.

But I was willing to try and figure it out; I just told him I needed a little more to go on. He couldn't tell me any more, and he was starting to get frustrated to the point of tears. I tried going through all the books on his shelf, asking if it was any of those. He just got more and more frustrated.

"I'm frustrated!" he bellowed at me.

I patiently teased out more clues, slowly, between his increasingly desperate sobs, as he answered about one of every ten of my questions. The book had been downstairs, and out, but he hadn't seen it when he was down there. The monster was brown. It was turning into a race between finding the book and watching him cry himself to sleep over this.

Finally, when he said something about the monster putting someone in jail, it clicked: he was asking me for the storybook version of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, which we had just read that weekend. So I found it, brought it up, and started reading it to him. He was dead asleep halfway through.

There are things I miss about his baby years. The snuggling, the naps, the ready excuses not to have to go anywhere. But I had forgotten not to miss the days when he couldn't tell us what he wanted because he couldn't talk yet. That night was a little reminder.

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Story Time

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