My daughter started telling stories when she was three.
Most of it was reused, recycled and repurposed from the stories I had told her or what she saw on You Tube (Link to the proof: Plagiarism with Brains: Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose). She would add or changes animals in my animal stories and replaced mango with pumpkin in fairytales.
Yesterday, she wrote her first piece of poetry–on the fly and in 60-seconds flat. I actually had to ask her if she had taken ‘inspiration’ from someone. She claims she hadn’t.
Here is the piece. Before you ask, I have taken Your Highness’s permission.
Touch the sky,
Touch the sun,
Just go on and have fun.
You don’t know how long it will stay,
Or rather it will just go away.
I haven’t correct anything there. I had just asked her why she wanted to write game score on the diary I had given her to write poetry and stories in. So, she just took a pen and jotted these lines on the first page (rather the cardboard) of blank diary.
Now that she has a foot in the door, I can hope. I know, there is no guarantee that she would want to continue at all. But that’s life of a parent.
My daughter has done it again. She has surprised me and given me chance to showcase her creativity 😊. Sometimes I wonder if I am taking advantage of her creativity…that doesn’t stop me though 😁.
This time it is a doll dress👗. Lately my daughter has acquired three new dolls 🎎 and is facing a sudden dearth of dresses. She has recruited both me and her new aunt for dress designing and got 10 new dresses 💃👘👗 from her father but you know how a woman can never have too many clothes?!
And we have 6 dolls 💃💃💃💃💃💃here.
So, she has started helping herself. She created this one out of a shiny plastic balloon–the kind that doesn’t stretch–and cello tape. Can you believe it?
I love how she has created the complete diva look by sticking three pieces together. It would have taken me hours to create a body hugging dress. Add to it the accessories her father has got her!
I wonder if I should retire and let her take up dress designing for dolls🥰
So, you might have noticed that my posting frequency declined greatly lately. Earlier I used to write at least a couple of posts every week. But in the last month, since mid-Ramadan, I went slow, too slow actually.
No, it had nothing to do with fasting, something to do with my book–The Forest Bed–and everything to do with a couple of projects I had going on for my daughter.
As you might know, I love building things with hands. Earlier I saw on You Tube a folding kitchen that a father had created for his daughter where she could stand and cook. The kitchen was simple, clean and orderly with hangers and stands for utensils, a microwave and a working sink. I was specially struck by how everything was in place and ready to play when the girl opened it so the child doesnot spend time setting it all up.
My house doesn’t offer enough space for anything that elaborate. But setting the kitchen up is my daughter’s pain point. Usually by the time she is done with it, it is time to sleep, eat or study. So, I definitely agreed with the ready-to-play and folding kitchen part.
So I built it out of waste material.
The cardboard was home, thanks to Amazon–around 12 X 8 inches. I just cut one side to be folded up and down. Then, I used the side flaps to add to the depth. Of course, they close too when we are folding, making it a compact storage for all the things that were earlier found all over the house. Since cardsheet was not available due to lockdown, we covered it with the artsheets my daughter had already coloured. The utensil hangers are made of old buttons. The racks are made our of smaller cardboard boxes.
Since the space was too small, rather than sticking the oversized plastic stove on the counter top, we painted it on the counter…by we, I mean my humble-self and my very own four-year-old Leonardo da Vinci.
I added a bit of rough outlines for accent…”rough” being the operative word here. I didn’t want to take away the childish feeling from the paintings so I ensured that the outlines were not clean and symmetrical…they were drawn as if I didn’t have my glasses on (which I didn’t)…way off the mark but still leaving a mark (smudge, actually) on the sheet.
Closed front gates open upwards all the way back and down to form the floor.
The crazy fun I had during the process made me question my mental age…which was about five a couple of years back. I think now it has shrunk to three and a half.
I am planning to add a refrigerator and oven on the outerwalls in my next vacations. Any ideas?
Short Stories | Fish-eye Perspective 