Stories Bedtime Son's My

My four year old son finds everything funny. If you cross your eyes at him, he'll giggle for 20 minutes.

There are many upsides to this of course - one being that when he's tired, instead of becoming cranky and prone to crying like most kids, he turns into a completely giddy, giggle monkey (although this is more fun that crying, it can make brushing his teeth tricky).

A downside to this is that his latest favourite source of chuckles is having his bedtime stories read to him backwards. I mean completely backwards - from the last page, starting with the last word.

Now this is not as easy as it sounds (granted he wouldn't notice if I messed it up slightly, but I'm too OCD for that ;-) Our brains are so programmed in our language that certain word combinations come off our tongue in the correct order, even if they're not read that way.

For example, consider the following phrase:

"Suddenly Thomas began to feel a pain in his boiler."

...read quickly backwards (by me!) would come out like:

"Boiler in his a pain feel to began Thomas suddenly."

In order to over-ride your brain's automatic word order sorting process and actually read every word in reverse order, you have to read the text much slower. This makes story time take much longer.

(Hmmm...!!)

Smart kid.