Well, I rather enjoyed it for what it is, Joe, which is a very sweet and very simple evocation of bedtime stories. I didn't have any of the questions that seemed to trouble Annie. It seemed clear to me that a parent (presumably the speaker) is doing the reading, that there are 3 children (girl, boy, girl in age order), that Bear is capitalised because Milne would often capitalise for comic effect (Bear of Very Little Brain), that the "goodbye" refers to the famously tearjerking ending of the final Pooh story, that the boy is probably the one snuggling and the eldest girl is independently alert because she is older (too old to snuggle), that the boy is absorbing life lessons from the stories while the older girl enjoys the stories but feels she "knows" the lessons/narrative conventions already and that the youngest girl is biting her own toes, as toddler age children do. "Blithely" is a word from the adult narrator, it seems, and I also liked the repetition at the end, where the phrase is extended giving a sense of consolidation and "settling down" to sleepiness. Very sweet.
|