A Bedtime Story

I recall in my youth I would always read something before bed. No matter how late I went to bed, I would spend some time reading. Often my parents would come and turn my light off to get me to stop.

We've been trying to get a bedtime story in with our kids every night as well. Thankfully our older one is now reading independently (in fact we often need to switch the light off to get her to stop - although "Santa" brought her an e-reader for Christmas... one which is back-lit :-S). The problem now is that reading to our younger daughter in the bottom bunk elicits complaints of being disturbed from the top bunk.

The holiday period was especially tough, with the additional lockdowns the four of us were stuck at home all day, and as my wife and I got more tired, the girls did less activity, so they would be awake later at night, so then my wife and I would be more tired the next day! A vicious cycle. Often even after lights out (which was often pushed back by over an hour) there would be choruses of "Tell us a story". My go to strategy in this scenario (lights are off but I need to tell a story) falls into two categories. Either I paraphrase a film (have told them the one about the alien who gets left on the planet earth then uses household objects to call his parents back to pick him up), or if I'm feeling creative I makeup something on the fly.

These "creative" stories would often just be based loosely on our lives. Very early on with our oldest daughter I would tell her about a "cutie little girl" who would wake up, go to nursery, go to the park with her mum, dad would come back from work, they would have dinner and her dad would tell her a bedtime story about a "cutie little girl". But the other day it was after 9pm and our younger one was just not having any of it. So I scooped her up out of her bed, and walked around a bit. I eventually offered to let her lie down in Mummy and Daddy's bed. As we lay down she spotted a box of Double Dips (a confectionery item with two flavours of sherbet and "swizzel stick" for dipping). My wife had bought them for a birthday party and in the process of tidying things up in the house this had been left on the bed.

When my daughter asked "Daddy, what's that box?" I wanting to avoid the inevitable "can I have one" so thinking on my feet I decided to tell her a story about the box. It's a bit of a mix of elements of the Disney film "Onward" that we had just watched, The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Over 2020 I was on an authorship programme, and the one style of writing that we missed out on was pure fiction. As such I decided that I would write up this story as an attempt to do some fiction writing. It's nothing fancy, pretty much told as it came out, but here it is:

https://medium.com/@gauravprinja/the-wizards-box-4ecd27c42c76

Hope you enjoy it.