New Year, New Goals, New Musings

So we did this today. Yesterday's ride was more challenging (especially mentally) than expected, and today's ride, ostensibly a "recovery" ride, had its challenges as well. I'm happy to have ended a terrific year and begun a new terrificer year with bike rides.  In amazing weather, no less. (Although I wouldn't mind some rain, please.)

When my kids were little and they wanted me to read them a book I'd read a gazillion times (tell me I'm not the only parent to have memorized Goodnight Moon or Where the Wild Things Are), I'd counter by telling them what I called "Peanut Butter and Jelly Stories."  That was their favorite sandwich, and the stories involved two fictitious kids, Emily and her little brother Timothy, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  The stories were situational:  whatever my kids did, I retold with the sandwich featured somewhere, and a moral or different outcome attached.  For example, if I was taking them to tap & ballet class after school and they got into a spat, I'd use the PB&J story to reflect that, and demonstrate how it might have gone differently.  I don't know that they got that, but they hung onto every word, esp. the adjectives and adverbs. (I'm sure you have no problem imagining flowery speech from me, right?) And it got me out of reading another book that I'd read so many times that I could hardly muster the enthusiasm to re-read. It was also an outlet for my closet author.

Lately I've been thinking it might be a good idea to put those PB&J stories into book form, publish it, and give my kids something to give their kids.  I asked my daughter today if she would sit down with me (she's a writer, a copy editor, a blogger and English, French & CompLit major) and help me recreate them.  I was blown away by her response: "I don't really remember the details, they were largely situational, but I remember I really loved them."  She didn't remember the specifics...but she remembered how they made her feel.  That's huge for an author.  And I'm not one, really.  (Closet-author, yes. Not out yet.) 


I think I'm going to start telling PB&J stories again, and blog them, and link them to where my kids can read them.  Maybe the world needs more PB&J stories...I know kids in the world need more interaction and reflection with their parents. Let's see what happens.