Here's the setting: we were taking a break from playing in the late afternoon. It had just started snowing for the first time this season, and she had been looking out the front window a lot, watching it fall. I moved on to something else, and before I knew it she had pulled out a little notebook with that Julius monkey on the cover, which she had gotten with a Happy Meal (or a different fast-food establishment's analog) a month or so before. She picked up a mechanical pencil that I had been using earlier and started sketching lines and swirls across most of the pages.
After a while, she handed it to me and started asking me to write down phrases for her. I started on the first page and started trying to keep up as she gave me things to write, after which she would inspect my chicken scratchings. She turned to the back of the book and asked me to draw a McDonald's, which I did, and then she turned to the second-to-last page and told me to write something else down. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, she dictated a story to me, which I dutifully transcribed, progressing backwards through the notebook. I present it here, in its entirety.
WE'RE GOING TO MCDONALD'S by Lily Drummond
McDonald's is the place that they're going.
"We're almost there."
"Didn't I already say that? Because we're almost there but it's far away."
We're far far away now. I don't tell what kind of McDonald's is on the map.
We're still far away.
We're almost there, but we're still far away a little.
We're not here yet.
It's snowing outside!
Now it's raining outside.
Marina and Paul walked down the street.
Paul and Marina got back into the car and then they said, "It's still raining but now it's turning into snow."
"This road is too far for me!" Paul said.
Paul ended up in a place very different. He ended up in Lalaloopsyland.
"Where is this place?" Paul asked.
Spot said, "It's Lalaloopsyland!"
Something really had happened when Mad Finger started to make Lalaloopsyland a chef.
"Oh no! We're going to fall! We're going to crash into a big chef statue!" Paul said.
David is one of the kids. David says, "I'm painting in the car!"
Paul says, "That's funny. Why are you painting in the car instead of in the house?"
"This is going to be my masterpiece!"
Molly, one of the girl kids, said, "My ears are swollen."
Nick will say, "Hey, break our car! We're going to crash at the park. We're going to falllllll..."
Crash!
This is the ending of my story.
Holly Hobbie says, "I thought our garden would be bigger."
Marina says, "Paul, it will take so long that we'll have to go back until we do something."
There's a bee buzzing around our car! Until we see Mad Finger.
DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN!
"Hm. I have to ruin the city until anyone knows."
Peter will say, "I thought we will drive around flowers instead of the road."
Peter's garden had been chewed by a cat.
"And then you're in your pajamas! How did you say that? I thought you didn't!" said Molly.
There you have it. I like how she started to incorporate things she was thinking about at the time she was telling me the story, about the falling snow or her Lalaloopsy dolls or Mad Finger (who you can find out more about in an earlier post). I have no idea who Paul, Peter, and Nick are. She even threw in some elements from a TV show that was going on in the background at the time, the buzzing bee, driving along a road, or the cat that passed through the room.
I don't know if Lily is going to turn out to be a writer. I hope that, by my and Amy's actions, she's getting some idea of how improved your life can be by reading and writing. She’s quite a reader already, and daily stuns me with some of the words she can sound out -- today it was "lionesses", by the way. But just in case, I wanted to make sure that I saved her first attempt at stringing things together herself. I'm just glad I was there to put it down.
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