Making Her Own Stories

In the past few days I've noticed a change in Alyce; she is starting to make her own stories.  Last night we cooked dinner over at Gram's and Papa's and they handed me a piece of junk mail that had my name on it but their address.  Most likely because we forwarded a few magazines to their house while we are living in the apartment and our new information hit a junk mail list.  When we got home Alyce asked if she could open up my mail and I agreed she could.  The junk mail was an advertisement for a home security system and one of the pages at the top there was a picture of a fire truck and a police car.  Alyce, sitting in my lap pointed out the police car and fire truck and described aspects about them such as fire trucks are loud.  She then proceeded to turn the page over to the blank side and started talking like she was reading a book even through there was nothing there.  The story she was telling focused on firetrucks that were red, were loud, and come by our house every day.  The story was only a few sentences long but every time she'd tell it she would add another aspect to it like there being more than one fire truck or police cars driving by too.

Earlier in the night while at the dinner table we were all talking about something that isn't important to the story with each person getting a turn to talk.  When it became Alyce's turn to talk she started going off on some tangent where most of her words either didn't make sense or were being mumbled.  This went on for maybe 20 seconds with the rest of the table just staring at her like lobsters were coming out of her ears.  After those 20 seconds she just stopped, looked at us, and said "I'm gonna be funny.  Bwak, bwak, bwak".  "Bwak" being the sound a chicken makes.  And while she is making her chicken noises she puts her hands in her armpits and flaps her arms like a chicken.  It was hilarious!  After she finished she asked the rest of us to do it too so going around the table we all made chicken noises, flapped our arms, and Alyce giggled the entire time.

Alyce is now making her own stories and her own humor.  I give the credit to her being older and to preschool.  I think her being in a structured environment with teachers trained in educating preschoolers has done wonders for her development.  I couldn't be prouder of her.