Expectations

I’m reading the book, The Phantom Tollbooth to my children at night before they go to bed.   I wasn’t sure if they would both be interested, but they’ve gotten into the book and my daughter is even interested on having me sit with her brother on her bed to do the reading.   This is atypical, which is interesting for her because she’s usually such a sharing, social person.

She is on the bottom bunk of the bunk and her brother sleeps on the top.   Her bed is a full-sized mattress and her brother has a twin-sized one above.   It would make sense to do story reading with them while sitting on her bed, but she rarely will agree to let that happen so we sit on the floor or I read from the chair and have them lie in their beds.

But since they’re both interested and she wants to see the pictures, she likes us reading on her bed.  They’ve liked the book so much they’re not even interrupting to ask questions.   At the end of each chapter I stop reading for the night but what has been happening so far is the chapter leaves off at a bit of a cliffhanger—the market stalls have all been knocked over or Milo and Tock have been sent to jail for six million years.   I’ve given them a preview or perhaps a teaser of what’s coming up in the next chapter such as telling them that. “the return of Rhyme and Reason” is in fact two princesses by those names.

At the beginning of the book once Milo has gone through the tollbooth he stops at “Expectations” and there is a discussion about what it means to have expectations.   My husband, when getting them ready for bed the other night took advantage of this and told them as they were brushing their teeth that they had three choices.   They could:
- meet his expectations,
- Exceed his expectations, or
- Not meet his expectations.

It is from this that my daughter started trying to, “exceed his expectations” that I wrote about the other night.   I didn’t realize where it came from until after my husband had read my blog post and told me his discussion with the children.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is at a campout at his school tonight.   It’s more of a camp in as they’re sleeping on the floor of their classroom, but that mattered not to him.   He was pretty excited this morning, carrying his sleeping bag and other items to school for the day and night.   Tomorrow we’ll hear all about it, I’m sure.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wants to see the pictures in The Phantom Tollbooth book, which is one of the only books she’s been interested in seeing pictures for recently.   It’s a shame though, because the pictures are drawn in black pen and are very dense and hard to figure out in some cases, even for those of us with good vision.   But she’s happy having me tell her what’s in the pictures and looking at what must be black fuzzy images to her eyes.