Preschooler Stream of Conciousness

In our daily routine, my daughter and I play family. A lot. Everyday. Pretty much it’s the only thing she wants to play. If I have other things to do, it becomes ‘Doing-The-Dishes-Family’ or ‘Laundry-Folding-Family’. It’s fun for her as she loves to role-play, specifically when she gets to be in charge. Go figure.

This afternoon we were in the middle of ‘Church-Family’ when she decided that she was going to play our pastor from our church in Oak Harbor. “Let me go get my Bible!” she announced suddenly. With her Bible storybook in hand, she bounds back into the “church school”, aka my bedroom, to read me a story.

What ensued can only be described as a hilarious stream of consciousness.

“Hello class. (speaking to me and the dog) I’m Pastor Spencer. I’m going to read you a story today. This is church school. We learn about God here. And we go to school. ” (Her last preschool was at our church.)

“Let me see, where was I?” she asks as she flips through the glossy pages and rearranges the ribbon bookmark. “Oh! Yes! Chapter Oregano.” (Wait, wha–? Right! We’ve been cooking a lot lately.)

“God was on a ship. With Flamingos. They are pink which is my favorite color. And a snake. The snake wasn’t pink. And it ate a bunch of animals. Then they went to find a rainbow.” Turning the page she exclaims, “Yay! They found the rainbow!” Now breaking into song she sings, “Red-orange-yellow-green-and-blue-and-don’t-forget-purple-too!”

“Then the pirates came and cleaned the ship. They were pirates on the ship, then they became human. God was there, too, but he fell out of the boat.”  The dog decides at that point to get up and lay back down in a more comfortable position. “Buck, you aren’t listening. You get a color change – you are on yellow!” (Her school has a behavior color change system; Green=good, Yellow=warning, Orange=Time Out, Red=Principal referral.) “No, Buck. This isn’t the time to play fetch!”

“Now where was I again?”

This girl seriously cracks me up. She has a crazy imagination and will talk to herself and all her menagerie of characters for hours. More often than not, I can gather what she’s really saying and identify exactly where in real life she’s pulling it from. Today? I am sure that our pastor, as well as her previous preschool teachers, never talked about God falling out of the Ark, a snake eating people, or chapters of the Bible being labeled as spices.

I can’t wait to see what happens at church tomorrow!