P is for pretending

At the moment in our house, barely a day goes by without a visit from a witch, a dragon or a giant frog.

Not really, of course.

As the Wee Man says ‘it’s only pretend, Mummy’…usually followed by ‘Mummy INTO A FROG – POP!’ whilst waving his invisible magic wand in my direction.

But one thing that without fail is a many times daily occurrence in our house is the telling of ‘Dawdle’ stories.

And this is all something that arose because one night, I couldn’t find my glasses.

‘I know’ I said to the sad faced Wee Man – recalling tales that my Mother used to make up for me and my sister – ‘instead of reading from a book, why doesn’t Mummy tell you about…er… Dawdle?’

‘What’s that’? asked the Wee Man.

‘It’s a little girl called Dawdle and her big brother Cy’ I said. ‘And they go on fun adventures’.

‘Are they like me and Bubby D?’ asked the Wee Man (he picked up on that pretty quickly!)

‘Er…yes’ I said. And so the takes of Dawdle began.

Letting my inner monologue have free reign, Dawdle and Cy soon discovered a new friend, a pig on wheels who had fire breath and liked to roast pineapples and eat them, whilst dodging coconuts thrown at him by a pesky monkey. And they all liked going down the BIGGEST curly slide in the world, after being flown up to a cloud by a space dragon. And then bouncing STRAIGHT back up again, because someone had put a trampoline at the end of the slide – that pesky monkey…

Believe me, the story of the curly slides has been told many, many times. And the space dragons. And the pig on wheels. The pesky monkey has been caught, told off, and then asked to join in the fun. And absolutely hundreds of pineapples have been roasted.

And slowly, as the weeks went by, more friends emerged – Sammy and Suzie the snakes, and Meelo the cat; Julio, another little boy that they met in Spain (strangely around the same time as we went to Madrid…) and the pesky otter and pesky badger too.

Not only is it a fun way to end the day, lying in the dark having cuddles and enjoying sharing increasingly more interactive tales (‘no, no NO Mummy it happened like THIS!’), but I also realised that it’s a very good way of preparing the Wee Man for things that are going to happen, or talking through what was happened.

If something had happened to Dawdle the night before that miraculously then happened to the Wee Man the next day, he was a lot more calm and accepting of it than if he’d just been told ‘we are going to do X tomorrow’.

It’s been a great way to talk about his friends moving house, starting new groups, the importance of crossing roads safely…just about everything really – in a way that he engages with and really takes in what’s being said.

And I quite enjoy letting my internal imaginings run free, too J