Stories Are Also Fragile Things

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks.  But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.” ― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Since Maeve has recently been telling me long, intricate stories in the car, I thought it would be a good time to get her started on writing some of her stories down. The reason yesterday's story ended up being about Rapunzel is that she had just watched most of the movie during lunch, although I insisted she make up her own story and not use any lines from the movie.

Thank goodness Maeve doesn't have the high standards of the Disney animators, as my pictures were generally pretty bad; but since she's the one who asked me to draw, say, a pan with a pancake in it and a hand holding an egg over it, she's the one who has to live with the nigh-unintelligible result:

Maeve's story involved several characters and toys "popping out". When I was illustrating and I asked her what they had popped out of, she informed me it was a magical golden crown. Which explains this illustration:

And you can tell it was a good story because the whole thing ended in macaroni and cheese.

Last night when I was putting her to bed, I asked, as I always do, what she's going to dream about. (It's an exercise in getting her to close her eyes and relax...) She told me she was going to dream about going to the zoo with Daddy and building a jungle gym for the monkeys so they didn't have to swing on "the monkeybars that are made out of fabric". She continued on in this story but I told her to think about it and tell me what happened in the morning. All that to say, I think there are going to be a lot of stories this year.