I was walking down the hallway past the bathroom when I heard a strange voice. It was a child’s voice that was trying its best to be kind of low and gravelly, and I paused outside the door for a moment to listen. After a minute, I heard the same voice answering. (This time without trying to sound low and gravelly) It was my four year old daughter. I couldn’t understand the words through the door, but I could hear the tone and pace of what was being said. It was clear to me that my daughter’s gravelly voice was telling a story to my daughter’s natural voice, with my daughter’s natural voice asking questions about what was going to happen next to the low, gravelly voice. It was pretty funny to listen to.
Standing outside the door, I tried to imagine what was happening inside. The best idea that I came up with, was that my wife had put our four year old in the tub, and she was having story time with one of the tub toys. From the tone of the voice, I guessed she was playing with a Cookie Monster figure that rides a Sesame Street toy submarine in the tub.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I knocked on the door and came in, wanting to enjoy her playfulness and imagination that I had pictured from the hallway. After I opened up the door I realized that I had REALLY underestimated both her playfulness and imagination.
She was kneeling next to the closed toilet lid, and was asking the toilet about what was going to happen to the pony in the story next. She then answered for the toilet, (using that deep voice that I had mistaken for Cookie Monster) saying that the pony made it to the party on time after all. The funniest part of all was watching her quickly open and lower the lid of the toilet to make the mouth of her giant “puppet”. She had the toilet lid’s ‘lip sync’ down perfectly. It really looked like a giant mouth telling a pony story.
I stood quietly listening to her story until she finished. I was just enjoying my little girl. After she was done, she looked over her shoulder at me with a huge grin on her face, and we broke into a fit of laughter together. It was a moment that I know I won’t soon forget.
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