My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
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That year I invited some of my friends' children to our house to celebrate her third birthday. I hired a puppeteer to provide the entertainment. The puppeteer set up a small theater in the living room and the children sat on the floor to watch the show. Allegra was always so energetic and gregarious at home and with her family, and I remember being surprised to see her leave the group of children and sit off to the side by herself. She didn't interact as I thought she would. She even appeared to be a bit withdrawn, which was very unusual. I was about to go sit beside her and bring her closer to the group when she suddenly stood and went right up to the stage.
She reached out for the puppets, but I stopped her and brought her back to her place. "You have to watch them from out here," I said. She sat for a few seconds and then was up again. She stared at the puppets and then up at the strings and the puppeteer behind the theater — I sensed that she couldn't connect the two: puppet and string. She couldn't see that one controlled the other or that the puppets were not real. She believed they were real people, tiny people. Several times I brought her back to her place and each time she stayed for a moment but then she was up again, staring at the stage, fascinated by the strange little creatures and oblivious to the other children around her. I didn't think her behavior was alarming or even particularly odd, but I was bothered by it. I'm certain all the other children's imaginations translated the puppets into real people, but Allegra was the only one who felt compelled to investigate. She was only three, but so were most of the others, and I couldn't understand why she was so restless when they sat quietly, mesmerized by what they were watching. There was a strange contradiction in her behavior: she was withdrawn from the group, yet she was also outgoing, almost as though she was in her own little world where she was happily alone, with no other children in there with her.
"Well, that's fine," I thought. "She is easily distracted." That's all it was, that's what I believed. I wasn't even all that surprised by it for I had already seen how difficult it sometimes was for her to concentrate.
At bedtime, I used to get into bed with her to read a story. I loved the closeness and the warmth, but Allegra could not sit still. She fidgeted and fussed and got up and down and crawled out of bed and back into it, and I soon realized that bedtime stories were not going to be a part of our nightly routine. I was saddened as I looked back at those times with Alessandro as being some of our closest. I wanted the same for Allegra. I was about to give up when I hit upon an idea that I hoped might work.
I got into bed with her one night and pulled the covers over us. This time, instead of opening a book, I lay my head against hers and said, "Once upon a time there was a little girl named Allegra."
She stopped fidgeting.
"And Allegra had a brother named Alessandro who was older than she was. And one night they were at the dinner table and Allegra dropped her fork on the floor."
That very thing had happened that night. It was a story she already knew, but it held her interest. "And then what happened to the little girl named Allegra?" she asked, and I told her how Alessandro picked up the fork but wouldn't give it back to her, and how she started crying until the character named "Mommy" told Alessandro to give it back to his sister.
She never got out of bed during those stories. They were about her and about what had happened that day. She knew all the characters and easily followed the events.
Night after night I told a story about the little girl named Allegra and what had happened to her that day, and night after night Allegra cuddled beside me and was eventually lulled to sleep by the sound of my voice. Later we added Goodnight Moon to our nightly bedtime stories. The repetition and simplicity of Margaret Wise Brown's story was enormously appealing to Allegra, and I could count on her settling in without distraction when I opened the book and read, "In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon."
