Boogs' Creative Stories

Boogs and I were talking while I was giving him a bath tonight. He was saying all sorts of things about all sorts of things. Then he said:
     One sleeping brown bear
     'Nother bear sneaks up on him
     He tackles the bear

I said, "Hey, you just made up a Haiku. That is a short poem that has 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 in the last. That was really cool." He then decided he wanted to make up some more poems and instructed me to go get paper so I could write down what he was saying. When he was younger (2 1/2 to 3), we used to do this all the time and called it our "bathtub poetry hour".  I had almost forgotten about it.

The following is the story he told me tonight. He let me know it is not a story, it is a POEM. I wrote down exactly what he said. When I needed him to wait so I could catch up with his words, he would stop and wait for me to tell him to continue. He was able to pick right up where he left off and keep going without losing his train of thought. He amazes me all of the time. Boogs used great inflection in his voice while he was telling this "poem".

One frog jumped in the water. There was a little fish swimming by. The frog just ignored the fish. Then a piranha came up to him. The frog swimmed into a hole. The piranha swimmed after him near the hole. Then the hole got deeper and deeper for the frog. The piranha found the entrance where the frog was going to come out. The piranha snuck toward the hole. While the frog was swimming a fish swam by and it entered the hole. Now that was a daddy fish that came by. The frog sat down for a rest. The daddy fish was swimming and met the frog and they became a team. The daddy fish told the frog, "The piranha is waiting outside the next entrance."  And then the daddy fish found the next entrance and they knew not to go to the next entrance. Then the daddy fish knew one thing sharp enough to dig through the rock. It was his own sharp teeth. He scratched them against rock every day. While the daddy fish was digging the piranha fish found out he was tiny enough to fit through the hole. The daddy fish finally broke through to the mine. They found a little boulder big enough to block the mine entrance. While they were moving the boulder, the piranha came by. It got closer and closer and closer and was just one inch away from the mine. Then he was just in the mine when they released the boulder. The boulder went right on top of the piranha who got flattened. Then he was called the flattened fish. That is why there are sting rays that look like flattened fish.  (After I read the story, I mean poem, back to Boogs, he added "One day the flattened fish met a electric eel. That is how he got his stinger to work and why he is a sting ray."

Boogs then told me he needed to add more to his first haiku poem. So I wrote that down too. Here it is:

The brown bear won the fight . Black bear knew a small eruption was going to start. Then the eruption would get bigger and bigger, like 3 feet mountain tall, like Mt. Everest tall. The black bear went away from the town. The brown bear stayed because he didn't know the eruption from the volcano was going to start. The whole place got destroyed. The brown bear didn't know a way out. He had a ladder but forgot he put it at the window because he was upstairs while the eruption was starting. He found the ladder, but the downstairs was filled with lava. The ladder was on the last window. He found the ladder got knocked down and melted by the eruption. So he jumped out the window and ran across his fence and then he got away from town. All the other animals did the same thing before he did. Everyone was safe.

When I tucked Boogs into bed tonight, I told him that he was a great storyteller. He replied, "That is because I don't make up dead stories." When I asked him what that means, he said, "You know. I don't put killing and violence in my stories like dead stories because you don't like that, Momma. I only put in a little bit of fighting."