Disney storyteller

When I was little, we had these fabulous little red tapes that had just about every Disney story that you can think of. I honestly don't remember if we had the accompanying books or not ("turn the page when you hear the chimes ring like this"), but I remember spending a lot of time listening to those tapes.

The reason why I'm posting about this is because my mom passed on one of those red tapes to us, and Abigail is absolutely addicted to the Cinderella (or "Cin-er-el-ella") story on it. She wants to listen to it while she eats breakfast and lunch and always insists on bringing it with us in the car. We had a tragedy a few days ago where she wanted to listen to the tape and I was in my bedroom folding laundry or something like that, so instead of getting me to turn the tape on, she tried to do it herself, and ended up unraveling the entire tape. It was a loooong afternoon until Daddy got home and did that magic thing with the drill to wind it all back up again.

Anyway, I spent some time this afternoon searching online for some more of those audio tapes, since we managed to get about 10 of the accompanying books at a recent library book sale, and I thought the tapes might be a nice "big sister" gift from the baby to Abigail. Sad to say, it seems almost impossible to find any, which I guess makes sense, since a tape from the 1970s or 1980s isn't going to last too long. I did find a few on ebay that I'm keeping my eye on, but anyway, good times reminiscing about those tapes. MB, do you remember the Drippy the Raindrop record which I accidentally dropped behind the speaker and scratched to the point of destruction? I remember being hotly accused of doing so intentionally, but I promise you, it really was an accident--or that Rikki tikki nimbo, no-so-rimbo, kip-berry-guichi or whatever his name was that fell in the well and it took so long for his brother to say his name and tell people that he'd fallen in that he drowned by the time they pulled him out. Wow. What a great story for little kids, but we loved it, probably because we liked to chant the name incessantly.

And on that note, Abigail keeps asking me to read her stories like Hansel and Gretel or this really horrendously scary one called "Lan Po Po" that's a retelling of the 3 Little Pigs, except instead of pigs it's children, and they manage to kill the wolf by hauling him in a basket up a tree and shattering him into a million pieces. Really disturbing stories that I don't want to read but was not thinking very clearly about when I bought them at aforesaid library sale (although Neil wanted the wolf-murdering children book, because he remembered it from when he was a kid). And why do we have all these other fairy tales about mermaids who will turn into foam on the waves if they don't take an enchanted knife and stab the prince? Cheerful. The Brothers Grimm is more appropriate than one would think (although I guess "The Little Mermaid" is a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale). And they're all so beautifully illustrated that an entranced two-year-old just wants to read the "princess stowy!" and doesn't understand why Mommy is skipping half of it (although i don't think Neil is, since this morning when we read "Sleeping Beauty" she pointed to Maleficent and said "Bad fairy! Mean fairy!"), whereas I tend to sort of slide over that whole curse part and focus on the pretty dress and the animal friends.

Anyway, can you tell we did a lot of reading this morning after our walk? Speaking of which, ugh, we're finally getting the summer heat that we managed to evade the last two months, although I am sincerely grateful that it held off until the end of my pregnancy. It's been lovely to go to school and do yardwork in high 70s/low 80s weather rather than the 94 we should be hitting today.