Repeat

After six weeks of waiting and wondering, we found out last week that Miss Mouse repeated her win in the PBS Kids Young Writers and Illustrators Contest!!!!  She was chosen as a Red Ribbon Favorite again this year!  I can't tell her enough how proud we are of her and her hard work; she re-did her illustrations this year no fewer than three times a piece (and there are five required illustrations - do the math; that's a lot of illustrating for this Mouse). She initially wrote an incredible story. Her descriptive words were impressive; I was pumped for her. Then....I read the rules and realized she had a 200 word limit. Yes, I should have read the rules before allowing my verbose little Mouse to put in all that work, but we all have our Achilles heel, and mine is reading instructions and rules. So, at that point, we had to cut out around 200 words from her story. Yeah, we had to chop it in half. I say "we" not because I wrote any of it, but because I did help her figure out how she could shorten the thing. We talked about parts of the story that were absolutely necessary for it to make sense and parts of it that were just fun to have in there to make it a more interesting story. All of those extra "fun" things got chopped out. Poor critter. Because of how hard she'd worked on the initial version, I told her I'd write it out on here just to have a copy of it somewhere. Unfortunately, we won't have a hard copy of the final, winning draft because after having gone to the grocery store to get her package weighed, writing out a self-addressed manila envelope, and delivering it to PBS downtown (all of this done with three kiddos in tow at nine months pregnant)
, I realized the next day that I'd forgotten to actually put the postage on the self-addressed envelope. In my defense, the "next day" was the day Manly Mouse arrived, so I'm chalking my brain lapse about postage up to the fact that I was going to have a baby the next day.  Anyway, her story and illustrations will be found online at www.pbskidsgo.org at some point this spring (I haven't yet checked to see if they've updated our local station winners), but the original version is as follows (oh, in the final draft, the ladybug got cut out....we decided she'd have to cut out one animal, and as much as she loved Spotty the Ladybug, Spotty was chosen to be hacked out....I think Miss Mouse is still a bit bitter about that, and she did defiantly say, "Well, I can STILL put her in a picture because there could just happen to be a ladybug in the woods, and then she'd not completely be cut out!"). Here it is:

A turtle, butterfly, and ladybug lived in the woods. The butterfly's name was Fluttery. The turtle's name was Slowy, amd the ladybug's name was Spotty. They were all friends.

One day they went to a meadow. The meadow had tall, brown, wheat-like plants.  They met a nice red truck. The animals said, "Hi," to the truck. They asked, "What is your name?"

The truck said, "Zoomy." The truck asked, "What are your names?"

The turtle replied, "Slowy."

The butterfly next replied, "Fluttery."

The ladybug last replied, "Spotty."

The truck said, "Oh, nice names!"

The animals said, "Do you want to come to our house in the woods?"

Zoomy said, "Oh, yay! I've always wanted to live in the woods!"

The animals said, "Okay! Come follow us!"

Zoomy hopped on his wheels. Spotty flew and flew in zigzag patterns. Slowy ran as fast as he could, but it was not very fast. Fluttery rode on the top of Zoomy. They finally reached the woods.  Zoomy stopped bouncing. Spotty stopped zigzagging in fancy patterns. Slowy stopped running.

Slowy said, "Follow me. I will lead you into our house."  They all followed Slowy. When they reached their house, they told Zoomy, "You go in first because you are our new friend." But Zoomy did not fit through the door. Zoomy felt sad.

All the others wanted to try to make another house for them all to fit. They said, "Hey, Zoomy, we're going to make another house, but first, please help us gather a bunch of grass to make our new house."

Zoomy went and gathered some grass. He put it in his truck bed.Then he went off to the house again and said, "Okay, I got a bunch of grass."

The animals said, "Let's work together to build our new house!"  They built their new house. They told Zoomy to go in first again. Zoomy fit through the door, but the grass toppled all over him. The animals said, "Maybe we should just cut a bigger hole in our house to be your door!"

They enlarged their door, and Zoomy fit! They lived in that house forever and were all happy. The End.