Trolls in the Garden

My to-do list today including weeding the garden and, bearing in mind Gene Campbell's advice that we should all stop wearing out our jaws talking in an endless stream of jibber-jabber to our children using abstract terms about topics that they couldn't care less about (next Tuesday we are going to go to spend the night at Grandma's house so we will need to remember to pack your pajamas), I introduced it with a story.


After naps and snack and playtime, we all went outside to sit at the picnic table and I began the story with Once Upon a Time. Here it is in brief.

Once Upon a Time there was a kingdom which was ruled by a very wise and good king. The whole kingdom was surrounded by a high stone wall and no harm could ever get inside those walls. For many years, the people who lived there were safe and happy. But one day the Trolls who lived in the woods outside the walls discovered that if they dug tunnels under the walls in the dark of night, they could creep through the tunnels and into the kingdom and no one would see them. So they began to dig tunnels under the walls and come into the kingdom. These Trolls were mean. They were big and green and they had many heads. But the Trolls weren't very smart and when daytime came, they would just freeze and stand completely still in the streets, thinking that this meant that no one could see them. (And we froze our bodies completely still and then looked at each other and yes, the girls could still see their sisters even when they were motionless. Someone should tell this to the bunnies, by the way.) One morning the king woke up and looked out his window and saw that his kingdom was full of green many-headed Trolls! He called the guards and they picked the Trolls up and threw them over the walls and told them to never come back. And so the kingdom was safe from Trolls once more.

So we went through this whole story and then we went to get the Trolls out of our garden/kingdom. The children LOVED the story and I have never in my life seen anyone weed with such enthusiasm. They begged me to be allowed to weed again after dinner and Natalie announced at bedtime that when she got up in the morning she was going to change straight into her clothes and go outside and do some weeding.

:-)