A blog a day (#3)

BEDTIME STORIES

How do you put kids to sleep? When they are infants, a softly sung lullaby would do the job. My wife used to invent lyrics for the lullabies and put them to sleep. My children were never difficult and would sleep without much effort, barring the occasions when they were unwell.

My singing abilities are 1 on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the best singer ever! Being so "notes-challenged", I didn't dare frighten my kids with my lullabies.

My work started when my children had learnt to speak and understand sentences. That was the time I showed what my capabilities were. I had a store of good stories that I had read, a good imagination to distort (humorously) some of them to entertain the kids, and a reasonably good vocabulary to put my thoughts to words. So I had a good time regaling my children with bedtime stories.

A favourite of mine was a story titled "Paati and the apple tree" (Paati in tamil is grandmother). It is a story of how an old lady (grandmother) who lived alone in a house with a garden and an apple tree outwitted a fox which would steal apples from her tree. I had told the story to my children from the book/comic book that we had bought and that was nice, but what was funnier was that I used to embellish the tale with my own additions - grandma boiling milk and watching and counting the apples, grandma distributing the fruit to her visitors from the village, etc. There was always something new; and on occasions my children would try and correct my story. The funniest twist to the story that is  remembered by my children till now is the reversal of roles. The story that I told was titled "Apple and the paati tree". So they imagined many grandmas hanging as fruit from the tree and the Apple living in the house. Unfortunately such humorous twists to the story resulted in my kids never sleeping while I told the story. They would be laughing and wanting more of the story! 

My wife had a story too. That was a story of "Atree rishi and his wife Anusuya". Now that story my wife told them in the same way that she had read, except to modify some elements of the story to make them understand the tale. The story was repetitive and to this day my sons say that they don't know how the story ended, since they were asleep by the time half the story had been told. 

Bedtime stories should be repetitive and boring! That puts kids to sleep quickly.