Make Up Monkey

This is what we call my 4-year old from time to time, except we insert her real name (which also starts with an "M", so it still has a nice rhythmic ring to it). We call her this because the kid has a HUGE imagination, and likes to pretend that things she imagines are real. Or, when we call her on it, she will say, "No...it was in my DREAM"...to which we all say "Ohhhhh...okay".

Last night at the dinner table she was telling us her dream, and it went a little something like this...

Monkey: So...last night, I had this dream, and me and Mommy were out in the forest and there were giraffes and we rode on their backs.

SAM: You rode a GIRAFFE? Oh yeah, how'd you get on it's back? (this is my 11 yr old smarty-pants who likes to constantly rain on her sisters' parades)

Me: SAM, it's a dream...maybe the giraffe leaned it's neck down to the ground so we could get on.

Monkey: Yeah! That's what it did! So then we were at this cave, and there were bears in it. So we ran outside, but our giraffes were gone. So we were going to ride on zebras, but the zebra we saw was dead. But then we saw two other zebras...except, no, they were cows. So we rode on them really fast!

At this juncture in the story, we thought she was done...so her telling of her dream, prompted each of us to talk about our dreams. After we do this, Monkey starts crying. We ask her what's wrong, and she said she didn't get to finish her dream. So we apologized and told her to finish her dream.

Monkey: But now I forgot it!!

Me: We were riding away from the bears on our cows, remember?

Monkey: Oh yeah! So, the cows brought us to our house and we ran inside and hid in the closet.

Silence....

Me: And then what?

Monkey: That's it.

Me: Did the bears find us?

Monkey: No.

Me: We just stayed in the closet?

Monkey: Yep!

The End