Part of Dulcie's new and improved bedtime routine now she's settled in her own room is listening to stories as she falls asleep. I still have to stay in the room with her, but, since the introduction of story CDs, I am allowed to sit in a chair rather than kneel by the bed while she clings onto my hair! If she wakes up in the night, I put the CD on for her then too and am trying to encourage her to do this herself. We're getting...maybe not THERE, but SOMEWHERE.
A year or two ago I found a bundle of old Story Teller tapes in a charity shop and bought as many as I could carry, even though they weren't that cheap and I know from bitter experience that tapes from charity shops don't always work. (Yes, I'd been burned by Story Teller tapes before!) Anyway, these tapes did work and my dad, in his retirement, started transferring them onto CD for Dulcie and my sister's children. The project got kind of out of hand and he ended up scouring eBay for the missing volumes. We now have them all and my dad is still busily transferring volume two. He even records a little message at the start of each CD, some of which are most amusing and occasionally inappropriate...in the way only a grandfather can be.
Since starting the great Story Teller tape conversion project, we've discovered some kind person has actually uploaded all the stories to YouTube already.
The Great Big Hairy Boggart (shared at the top there) is one of my favourites. I also love The Shoe Tree. But really all the stories are great and told so brilliantly. You just don't get voices like that these days! None of your squeaky James Corden types here!
My sister and I used to listen to story tapes every night and I can still remember sections of some Story Teller stories word for word. Putting Dulcie to bed is a great nostalgia trip now and I love sharing some of my childhood with her and the fact that she's getting so much out of listening to the stories. She often picks up on little turns of phrase and asks me questions about things. She's going to be a linguistic genius at this rate!
The other CD we've been loving, also transferred from an old tape, a dodgy copy of one I borrowed repeatedly from our local library in the late '80s/early '90s, is The Furry Haggis Stories. They are bloomin' amazing (and so Scottish) and Dulcie LOVES them, but I can't find any reference to them anywhere on the internet. If my memory of the tape's cover serves me correctly, they had originally been broadcast on radio (BBC Scotland I thought, but maybe not?) but I have no idea who they're by or where they've disappeared to. Does anybody else remember them?
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We too have been experiencing minor breakthoughs in 'sleepytime'. Kyle has now managed a whole week of going to bed without meltdown and me cuddling him until he cocks out for over a week. Funnily enough our routine also involves stories but either reading or Cbeebies Bedtime Story. The CDs/tapes sound brilliant (especially your dad's intros)!
ReplyDeleteI spent most of last night awake, but without any hysterical screaming, so still a lot better than it was before. Reading is part of our bedtime routine too - two picture books then lights off and Story Teller. Perfect balance, I reckon :) Before we had Story Teller I was reading five or six books at bedtime, yawning through all of them!
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