Who needs TV? Or an iPad?

..when you can have a round robin storytelling session starring Rachel, Mommy and Daddy?

Tonight as we were finishing up our dinner, Rachel asked us to tell her a story (which she asks us to do ALL THE TIME NOW, I think she's secretly penning a memoir) and somehow we got the idea to tell it in sections, with each of us taking a section and sending the story in a completely new direction. Rachel gave us the prompts: The first story was about a girl who waved a chicken leg in the air and then a flower in the air, and the second story was about a person reading a book. She contributed one or two sentences during the storytelling, but then got tired and listened to us, her mouth half open, hanging on to every word. It was great.

You'd be amazed at where those stories went. The girl who waved the chicken leg and flower was named Deanna (courtesy of Drew) and she lived with her family in a house that was haunted by a ghost named Cyrus who turned Deanna's chicken leg into a flower and her flower into a chicken leg because he was upset that the house stood in the place of a garden that he used to tend for the family that had lived in the house 50 years before. So the family promised to let him fill their flower boxes with begonias if they agreed to stop haunting them (this was after a "house doctor" with funny instruments came to the house and diagnosed the problem). So, for the rest of the time they lived in the house, the begonias bloomed without any help from Deanna and her family; Cyrus, the gardener, tended to them.

The person reading the book turned out to be a librarian named Jenny who worked in a library with a door that she couldn't open. No one knew what was behind that door, not even Jenny. Well, one day she was alone in the library when she heard the door to the secret room swing open. She took a flashlight and investigated, but (Rachel's contribution) she was too scared to go in. So the next day she and her library science professor, Prof. Ruus, went into the room and encountered a little old man samed Sir Henry, reading a book from the pile of books he was sitting on, who got very cranky at being disturbed. And when Jenny and Prof. Ruus asked if they could read one of his books, he said no, they're my books in old languages and you wouldn't understand them, so go away. (Rachel didn't like that and said he couldn't come to her house). So Jenny and Prof. Ruus offered him a book of Dr. Seuss stories (including Horton Hatches the Egg and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins) and he was so enchanted by them that he grudgingly agreed to a book exchange. So, now when some of the books in the library are missing, and librarians don't seem to know where they are, they're really being read by Sir Henry.

"I really hope she remembers this," Drew said after we were done. "I want her to have a love of stories, and I want that to be a permanent part of her being." Now Drew is even asking HER to tell US stories. "OK, that's fair," she said.

Tonight is the first night I've ever thought, Damn, she is lucky to have us as her parents.