Bed Time Story

Last night Dawson and I found ourselves with nothing to do before bed. We had all eaten, (the children under duress, as usual. Sigh.) Liam was upstairs in his room reading. Dawson and I were sick of the books we were reading, and no one wanted to take a bath. Finally, Dawson decided he wanted to write something, so he dictated the following to me and I wrote it down. (The exclamation points were also dictated by him--he LOVES exclamation points. Who doesn't? When I was a teacher at OSU I used to tell my students--"No exclamation points! Don't ever use them. That and the word suddenly. Just replace it in your head with "Tah-Dah!" and you'll see what I mean." But I'll admit that when I worked at CosmoGirl! and we used exclamation points all the time, I did really grow to love them. So here they are, unedited.) Liam joined us halfway through...

"Once upon a time, there was a bear who lived in the forest with his mother and had a great time eating muskrats. They met a bird named Blue. She lived with her mom and dad and they lived with their Mom and Dad. So, they had a great time! Running, and having fun eating worms and playing hide and seek. Then one day they met a girl that was an otter that lived in a lake. She had a great time building her house and it was really fun.
All of these animals played together and had fun until one day a big mean bear named Picklebottom who ate pickles all day came to the woods and he was really mean to animals. He threw bricks on their heads, he hit their heads with a bomb, and he said mean things like, "You’re stupid," and, "Shut up," and "I’m going to set your fur on fire!"
Well, none of the animals wanted to go outside and play because they were afraid of Picklebottom.
One day, when Picklebottom was at school they sneaked his toys out of his house and sent them to the animal Salvation Army.
When Picklebottom came home he was mean to his cat, Ryely and Blue. And he didn’t know that his toys were missing because he never played with them.
So they put a bear bomb in his house and set it off. And it set his fur on fire, and he had to run to the lake.
“Be nice!” he said to Otter. “Why did you put a bear bomb in my house?”
“Because you were being mean,” said Otter.
“Oh. It’s because I eat pickles all day,” said the bear. So he started eating bread and changed his name to Captain Breadbottom.

And set his butt on fire. He went to the bathroom and the toilet got set on fire! The toilet sprayed water at him. And then he got to go to the animal hospital. The doctors said,"We’re going to have to set your butt on fire."
“Why?” said Captain Breadbottom. “I just did that and that’s why I’m here.”
“Because you are mean and evil,” said one doctor.
“No no no no!” said another doctor. “Because it’s just something we like to do. Put water on it after we set it on fire.”
OW!! thought Captain Breadbottom. “No way, are you setting my butt on fire. I won’t be evil or mean anymore. Look I’ll say something nice.” And he kissed both the doctors and said, “You are wearing a very nice hat. And YOU are wearing some beautiful pajamas!”
(Eeew!” said a random person outside the story.) And then he ran as fast as he could home, but he accidentally fell into a lava pit and there was a ladder but he went on the breakable one, and he fell in and sat in a big pile of lava.
OW said Captain Breadbottom. This is worse than if the doctors had set my butt on fire. Help!

To be continued……