Remember that creative spirit, "Genevieve," I talked about here and here? One of my favorite times with her is our nighttime routine. (I say routine but it alternates a lot). These are a collection of some of our bedtime laughs.
The Doggy Bed
One night, while trying to get little hyper, reluctant-to-sleep Genevieve into bed, I patted on her bed and started to say "come on, get in your bed, come on sweet puppy..." obviously with the high pitched puppy voice. Her face just lit up, she dropped to all fours, started wiggling her tail, and ran to jump in the bed.
Success.
Now, there have been several nights where she's been the Busy Bee that she is, but stops and says "do the thing!" And drops to play her puppy role.
Storytime Improv
Like I learned in a lot of education courses, one good thing to do while reading to kids is to ask them what they think might happen next. It gets their imagination going, gets them to pay attention, and helps them learn cause and effect. So with Genevieve, I did this a couple times, asking her what she thought was going to happen when Junie B. cut her slippers' hair or lost her mittens, or got on her stinky bus, for example.
All of a sudden though, Sometimes Abrasive Gen snatched the book from my hands, covered the page, and asked "what's gonna happen?!"
-I started guessing something like "Junie B. sat down next to that Grace and the bus started down the road again. All of a sudden, the bus driver takes a detour to an African safari! There were elephant trunks coming through their windows and lions roaming around!"
I hear a "noooo. That's not what happens! Try again!"
-"They go through a tunnel that takes them under the sea?! And they see octopus and mermaids and all these crazy deep sea animals that look like aliens?! Is that what happened?!"
Then another "that's not it either! What else?!"
-And I continued with some other absurd guesses about space or invading monkeys.
This is only somewhat unfortunate though, when we're trying to settle down and she always wants to do this because it gets her so riled up. So I sadly have to tell her we'll have to do the creative alternative seens during the daytime instead.
Princess Has to Pee!
This is a good laugh to end this post with... So, we have to wake Sweet, Sleeping Genevieve from her slumber to use the bathroom in order to avoid bed wetting. This can cause for a Not-so Sweet Awake Genevieve and a very difficult one to get out of bed (totally understandable). After several nights of almost getting kicked in the face and frustratingly trying to awaken this child, I discussed the issue with her before she fell asleep. I told her I was going to be waking her up at 10:30 and would say, "Princess has to pee! Princess has to pee!" She got a huge kick out of that and now often asks, "are you gonna wake me up and say 'princess has to pee?!'" Granted, sometimes it still doesn't work, but it's better than before.
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