This article describes literacy competence in the narratives of toddlers and investigates how they make use of different modalities, like gestures, sounds and physical actions. The body phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty serves as a theoretical frame for the researcher's lens, which is an A/r/tographer's lens applied in multimodal narrative analysis. In this article, emerging literacy is studied as event connected to toddlers' playful storytelling. Using a micro-ethnographic narrative approach, the article paints a cultural portrait of children aged one to three years and their narrative expressions. The analysis is based on video recordings, observations and field notes collected in a kindergarten with 20 children as research participants. The examples, analyzed with the use of a multimodal matrix, reveal the meaning-making process in children's narrative expressions. The multimodal expressions in the toddlers' narratives are embodied and relational. The storytelling moments are literacy-as-event, because the moments are fluid, easily disturbed, but still reveal emergent narrative literacy. However, the child holds the key to each narrative expression. This is also a key to development of adults' competence in acknowledging the narrative competence of the child.