Bedtime Stories

Lately we've taken to the time-honored tradition of reading bedtime stories to our younger children every night. We have this great edition of Peter Pan that has illustrations on every page, and it's already a familiar story because they've seen the movie, so the kids absolutely love it and have taken to the time-honored tradition of pleading for just one more chapter every night.

Sunday night, after promising to come read to them, I went into the office where we keep the book and was unable to find it. Unable to face the kids with no story, I made a snap decision that we would make up our own stories together. I asked one child to pick an animal, another to give the animal a name, and a third to come up with a description of the animal. At various junctures in the story, I would pause and ask them, "what do you think happened next?" and whatever they said became what happened next.

Without further ado, I present to you the story of "Tima, the Zebra who Urinated Inside":

Once upon a time, there was a zebra named Tima, but Tima wasn't like other zebras: Tima had a magic tongue, and when her tongue touched water it would turn the water into milk. Tima was so lucky because she always got to drink lots of milk.

One day, Tima drank a big barrel full of milk, and drinking all the milk made her so tired at she went into her house and fell asleep. While Tima was asleep, the clever hare came and put a lock on her door so that she couldn't get out. When Tima woke, she found she was locked in...and what was worse, she had to urinate.

Tima called out, "help me please. I'm locked in my house, and I have to urinate!" But no one came, so she waited, but still she had to urinate so badly that she called for help again and again no one came. Now Tima was beginning to have a pain in her stomach from needing to urinate, and she knew that if she didn't urinate soon she might explode. She decided she would have to urinate inside.

So she did, but then she found she had a new problem: once she started urinating she couldn't stop. Soon the urine was up to her ankle, and she was still urinating! She called for help again, "will someone please come open the door?" but still no one came, and now the urine was reaching to her knee. She kept calling for help, and no one kept coming, and the urine kept rising higher and higher - to her waist, then to her shoulders, and soon she was swimming to keep her head above the urine.

And then Tima remembered her magic tongue. If she could turn water into milk, maybe she could do the same thing with urine. She thought, 'should I touch my tongue to the urine?' and because she was about to drown, she decided she had to. So she stuck out her tongue and touched it to the urine, but of course the urine didn't turn into milk, because only water turns into milk. But you know what the urine did turn into? Soda!

Tima remembered that she had a bunch of bottles in her house, so she dove into the soda, found the bottles, and began to fill them up. Then she took the bottles of soda and sold them.

And to this day, every time Tima urinates, she does it into a bottle and touches her tongue to the urine to turn it to soda. And now Tima is a very rich zebra.

The End