healthykids
My mind would wander. They’d
scold me. “Dad! You just said the little tailor
caught seven flies in a row. It’s, ‘Seven flies at one blow,’ Dad.” Busted. Sadly, it wasn’t long before I was caught yet again. “Dad! It was Chicken Little who
thought the sky was falling and The Little Red Hen who worked to bake the bread her lazy friends wouldn’t lift a finger to make. You always get them mixed up.” Verbal slips aside, the kids
DAD’S GOLDEN STORY HOUR
Kids Listen with their Entire Being by Clint Kelly
“S
oon, the brave little tailor and the beautiful Princess Minnie were happily married. And to
think it all began with seven dead flies.” So ends The Brave Little Tailor, star-
ring Mickey Mouse. Whenever I con- cluded reading with those words and attempted to close the well-worn book, I was inevitably hit with a chorus of, “Aw, Dad,” as they yearned for more. Why had my offspring narrowed
the book selections to so few predict- able favorites? Although the kids loved it, the constant repetition got to me. I
rather empathized with the darker side of the original Brothers Grimm version of the tale. It’s not that I was opposed to pull-
ing story duty. Children take comfort in the familiarity and lasting values of classic storylines. But at reading time, temptation whispered, “What they want is your time. It doesn’t matter what you read; just read…” A brief motor racing vignette in
Road & Track, perhaps, or the latest ma- jor league baseball trade analyses from Sports Illustrated?
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crowded closer. They jockeyed for position against my chest, listening to the whoosh of my heart, the cadence of the words and the conviction of my voice reverberating into their inner ears, down along their spinal columns and deep into their souls. Still, given the choice between
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle or the daily stock quotations, I’m afraid that Wall Street often muscled the good woman aside. My wife urged me to persist. “The
children have me all day. If only for a half-hour every night, you’ve got a solid grip on the children. Don’t let them slip away.” Okay, I thought. Just as Mrs.
Piggle-Wiggle had her magical cures for never-want-to-go-to-bedders, surely I could find a cure for my reading ennui. In fact, taking a page from the Little Tailor’s playbook, I found seven. First, I sometimes invited a “guest”
reader. A Grover hand puppet and a gravelly voice kept me alert, delighted the kids and gave those stories a fresh new lease. The second remedy was to turn off
the TV, ignore the phone and read by a lone lamplight that ringed me and my audience in a cozy glow. Third, for variety, we’d sometimes
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