My kids tell stories. Usually, they’re about whoever is causing problems in their life, which is not-so-coincidentally always a sibling. In our house, tattling isn’t just a national pastime; it’s an Olympic sport. But this week, my younger three kids came home with a tale that didn’t have anything to do with getting someone in trouble. It was a story of adventure and woe about what should have been a short bus ride from their school to our house but ended up being a meandering, disaster-filled odyssey worthy of Homer. Today, I’m not writing the story so much as conveying it on behalf of my ten-year-old, Mae, eight-year-old, Lucy, and seven-year-old, Waffle, who recounted it to me in great and unflinching detail. I hope I can do it justice here. With luck, it will be passed down through the generations by oral tradition, memorized by each storyteller and retold verbatim for hundreds or even thousands of years. Or maybe you’ll just forward this email to other people. I’m good either way. Here is that tale.
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