Fact v. Fiction

Christmas has come and gone, and we made it through another year without having to deal with "The Santa Question." However, listening to other people grapple with this question has made me realize that kids can't necessarily tell the difference between true stories and made up stories. So Wrigley probably thinks that all those people we read about in stories - Harold and his Purple Crayon, Peter in The Snowy Day, even Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel - are real people.

The same is likely true for the bedtime stories I tell Wrig. Over the past year at bedtime, I have probably told Wrigley 300 different crash stories - airplanes, trains, cars, farm accidents, penguin crash stories, octopus crash stories (you read that right - octopus crash stories) - and in each and every one an ambulance comes to the rescue. Lately, I've been telling stories about planes that get lost, end up in outer space, and crash into planets. On each different planet, the residents of that planet come to the rescue (or become part of the crash; we like big crashes in our family). On Mercury, the people look like silver strings. On Jupiter they have one eye, two noses, and three mouths. On Venus, their eyes are shaped like hearts. After a week or so of space crash stories, she has these various people memorized.

So: if, in the future, on some standardized test, the state asks her what the people on Mars look like, she'll know they have pink skin and yellow eyes (I just asked her that, by the way, and she does know). But if they ask her to tell fiction from non-fiction, she might struggle with that one.

Apparently, this means she's almost ready for her bachelor's degree.