Books and the Bus Driver

Well,  I'm twenty-nine weeks today.  Only eleven weeks of pregnancy left to go,  and we can't wait to meet our little girl!  With the time closing in,  we'll be having the baby shower in just a few weeks.  My mother in law is planning the shower,  and she shared a few of her ideas with me.  One that I'm pretty excited about is that she is going to ask everyone to bring a storybook instead of a card. 
 
   Thinking of that made me start to think of the stories my parents used to tell us as kids.  My mom used to read to us almost every night when we lived in Africa.  We went through the Little House on the Prairie series,  and then there was one series about a school teacher from a big city who came to teach in a small town.  We went through several books while we were there and it was always something us kids enjoyed. 

 All those good stories,  and yet the ones I remember the most are the ones my mother made up.  My mother is no ordinary story teller, she's a writer,  but the kind of writing she specializes in is more on the murder mystery and suspense side of things.  She could make a mystery out of anything.  For instance,  when I was in junior high my mother was a teacher at our school,  and so we had to leave very early every morning so she could go to teachers meetings and set up her class and all that good stuff.  Well,  every morning as we left our subdivision,  there would be a bus parked on the side of the road at the subdivision entrance.  The bus wasn't running,  it was just parked there and the driver was sitting inside.  And my mother,  being who she is,  would tell us that the driver had to stop there every morning to get rid of the dead bodies he had hidden on the bus.  She said that it was a good body dump spot because there was a drop off right there into a swampy area.   Now before you think "that is horrible!",  we were all old enough to know better.  None of us were traumatized or have an irrational fear of the bus driver.  I do have to say,  though,  the bus always seemed a little creepier after that. 

  There was also the time when my parents tried to convince us that they were aliens.  Do you remember those copper bracelets that people used to wear?  The ones that were supposed to draw out impurities,  but they just turned your wrist green.  Well,  my parents wore those for a while,  and one day we asked about the bracelets.  Instead of telling us what they were really for,  my parents told us that the bracelets were their alien communication devices.  Yes, you read it right.  Alien communication devices.  They spent the rest of the day beeping at each other and talking into their bracelets. 

  

Anyways,  we never lacked in entertainment as kids.  I wouldn't change it for anything.  Those stories are probably the reason that the only kind of books I like to read now are the ones with a really good suspenseful plot.  That's the only kind of good book.  I can't get through the lovey dovey ones.  They don't keep my attention long enough,  and let's just face it.  The guys in those books do not exist in real life.  So why read about it?

 So I figure my daughter should be raised on the same good stories I was; and with that in mind, my mother is currently working on her children's book entitled "I think my parents are aliens".  She might follow it up with "Do I have to ride the bus,  mommy?".  Because a good story never hurt anyone,  right?