Storytelling Week 4: The Stupid Monkeys

Once upon a time there was a very hard working maid. She was the maid of a King who never gave her any vacations. She was in charge of all the cleaning, laundry, and even watering the plants. 

However, one day the queen requested that the king should give the maid a vacation. The king gave the maid a week vacation. The maid has never been on vacation before, she was overly excited. 

Before the maid took off on her vacation, she had to find someone to cover for her while she was gone. She remembered how smart the king's monkeys were, so she hired them for the week. Little did she know, they did not understand her directions very well. 

The monkeys went to do their first task, mop the kitchen. It took them thirty minutes to even remember where the mop bucket was. Once they found it, they poured in the soap and then added the water. They then started to mop just how the maid told them too, however, they forget to tell the king they were mopping. So the king slipped and fell on the wet kitchen floor. The king was very upset.

Soon after the monkeys finished mopping they had to start the laundry. They went up to the king's room and collected all of his clothes. They did remember they had to sort all the laundry out by whites or colors. However, one red sock got stuck in the white pile. The monkeys started the laundry, which they thought was going perfectly. Then it was time to put the while load into the dryer.Uh oh..all of the whites were PINK! The monkeys were so confused on how this happened, until they discovered the one red sock. 

The monkeys were so tired but had one more task to finish for the day. They were hoping they could finish this task perfectly with no mistakes. Their last task was to water the plants. They filled up the water can and started walking around the castle watering the plants and flowers. The monkeys remembered ten out of the thirteen plants that the maid told them about. Since they forgot to water those three plants, all three of them died. 

Overall, the monkeys thought they did a great job at doing the maids job. By the end of the week, the king had yelled at the monkeys everyday. The king also told the maid that she was never to hire the monkeys again. If she wanted to go on vacation, she had to find a new maid for the week she was going to be gone. 

(Crazy Monkey Picture)

Author's Note:
The original story is about when a king gave a holiday to all the people in his city. The king's gardner wanted to go to the city with all of his friends, but was unsure how he was going to go if he still had to water the trees in the king's garden. Then he realized that he could have the monkeys do it. The gardner asked the monkeys nicely if them would water the trees so he could go enjoy his holiday in the city. The gardner told the monkeys that, "Do not forget to water the trees when the sun goes down. See they have plenty of water, but not too much." The monkeys were happy to water the trees, but they were unsure how to tell if the trees had enough water. So the monkeys pulled up each tree to check the length of the roots to determine how much water each tree should get. However, this killed all of the trees once the gardener got back.

I chose to keep the monkeys as the main characters of the story. I wanted to keep the story-line mostly the same, however, I changed the gardener to a maid so that the monkeys could have more tasks to complete. I just came up with daily chores and made the monkeys make basic mistakes.

Bibliography:
The Stupid Monkeys
This story is part of the Jataka Tales unit. Story source: More Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt, illustrated by Ellsworth Young (1922).