A Story to Tell

This is my latest project with Sydney.

She is always telling little stories to herself and while most of her stories are (understandable) simple, that will not always be the case, and one day I'll look around and have missed the progression.

So I started journaling her stories for her.

I just started writing a combination of what she was doing with the toys and what she was narrating herself.


One day, all of the animals were in the closet. The hippo came out first. Then the dinosaur. Then the other dinosaur and the lion. Then the closet closed and no one else could come out.

But then the giraffe came out, too.

(The 'closet' is actually a chest, but when I drew a closet on the page, she objected and insisted I draw the exact chest. She even pointed to different feature, the handle, the clasp, etc. and made me add the details.)

"Someone will come out!
Someone will come out
And it's me!
That's all the animals!
The animals are great!
All most there!
All most there!"
sang the giraffe.

(That song was almost word for word what she sang, the only thing that was different is that she was singing faster than I could write, so I missed some of the words. At the end I asked her who was singing and she told me the giraffe was.)

"Dinosaur, do you want to play with me?" asked the giraffe.

"The wheels on the bus go round and round."

All the animals go in the bus.

"Dum da dum

He wants to play with sumthin

The animals go in."

The animals go back in the closet.

(Once again, the song is all her. I think the "He wants to play with sumthin" line was actually about her brother who was trying to grab her toys.)

This is the "closet" and the two animals in this part of the tale. I think I will encourage the use of these since she likes playing with them anyway and they are actually puzzle pieces and that's how I was able to trace them to put them on the page so easily.

There was no bus, but since she kept singing "The Wheels on the Bus," I put it in the story.