Tell Me a Scary Story

It turns out that we have a little Stephen King in the making. Emily's big thing lately has been a strong need to hear scary stories. I think it started one night when I told the girls the story about the man with the hook for a hand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hook). This must have thrilled her because now she is constantly asking for more scary stories, and I do my best to come up with good stuff, but it never seems to be scary enough for her. Pretty quickly I grew tired of making up my own stuff so I started using watered down snippets from classic scary stories. So far, she has heard bits from The Shining, Misery, Psycho, The Birds, It (I thought that a scary clown story would put an end to it, but it just seemed to encourage her!), The 'Burbs, and likely more. I am quickly running out of material!

In trying to get myself off the hook, I tried to turn it around by asking her to give me a scary story instead. She rarely lets me get off this easily, but sometimes she will actually come up with a scary story for me. Surprisingly, her stories are pretty good. Not scary, but at least well-told (all things considered). One afternoon, we actually made a story together. She shut us in my bedroom (so that it would be dark) and made me crawl into bed with her. Then we took turns, each doing a few words of the story. It was actually pretty fun because neither of us knew where the story would go, but we both still had power to redirect it every time our turn came around. She was very pleased with that whole adventure.

In other news, school continues to go well for Emily. They just had an art exhibit (but we didn't go to it), and apparently Emily had a picture of a monster in the exhibit that one of the teachers thought was really good, so now I am curious to see it. Also, in school news, it looks like the social comparison process has begun. Yesterday, Emily declared that she wanted to wear a dress to school because, "All the other girls wear dresses and I don't and that makes me sad." Little does she realize that hearing her tell me an "All the other girls . . . " story is MY version of a scary story!