Last night I asked my two-year-old son, David, to pick out the bedtime story.
I was expecting something sweet and heartwarming– maybe along the lines of “Guess How Much I Love You”:
He returned with “The Revenge of Ishtar”:
Not exactly warm and fuzzy. But clearly this was the most fascinating and amazing thing in David’s world last night.
He asked me about some of the pictures. I told him that it’s one of the oldest stories in the world made up by some people who lived in Mesopotamia long ago.
I said, “Those people were good at pretending, weren’t they?”
He studied a picture for a few seconds and replied emphatically, “Yeah.”
Then he called his sister over to determine whether the woman pictured on one page was sleeping or actually dead.
They ultimately determined that she was, indeed, dead. And they were right.
I am a person who likes to sometimes sleep at night (rather than get trampled by a child or two who just woke up from a nightmare about an ancient monster.) So I refused to actually read the book before bed.
But I did let them look at it for a while. Because I distinctly remember my favorite book as a preschooler was an old elementary history book.
And I remember my grandma cringing every time I gleefully asked another question about the civil war. “So, grandma, those boys got to play drums in the war? Did they shoot any guns?” She answered in the negative. “But some of them still died, didn’t they?”
I begged my grandma to read that book to me repeatedly. My mom tells me that my grandma never actually intended me to end up finding that book.
I’m guessing she would have preferred a copy of “Guess How Much I Love You.”
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