The Kaczmarski Stretch Takes Root

In my maternal heritage, there is a long lineage of women who are fantastic verbal story tellers, spanning multiple generations.  When they get together it is noisy and the stories compound and are told with magnificent gusto, and those listening are generally thrown into hysterical laughter . . . the kind of laughter that makes all your muscles hurt and strains your bladder.  These storytelling women were such a strong presence in my childhood, and although I’m not really a verbal storyteller, I have always appreciated those astonishing stories and loved watching people’s reaction to them.

In my extended family there is a tendency to embellish the truth just a bit for storytelling impact.  When caught up telling an engaging and momentous story, it’s not uncommon for the person talking to change a few small facts in order to make the story just that much more exciting.  Almost everyone in my family does it, and you have to take the stories with a bit of a grain of salt.  The phenomenon is affectionately called “the Kazcmarski Stretch.”

It seems that although I don’t to a lot of spontaneous verbal storytelling with my kidlets, and even though they haven’t really been privy to one of those wonderful, uproarous storytelling sessions, the tendency to do a bit of stretching for dramatic effect has made it’s way down to The Banana.

Today at MOPS the mother of the little girl at The Banana’s preschool who shares her same birthday mentioned to me that she had REALLY been enjoying all the stories from Hannah that her daughter has been bringing home from school.  Uhm, what stories?  I wondered.

It turns out that The Banana had absolutely convinced her classmates that she turned nine years old on her birthday.  When her friends came back skeptical the next day after talking to their parents about their nine year old classmate, The Banana modified her birthday age to six.  And then the next day she told them all that her older brother, Noah, was really, truly in jail.  Without a doubt.

No matter how much The Banana’s birthday buddy’s mother tries to convince her otherwise, The Banana’s friend is completely convinced that our family has an all out criminal in its midst.