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A Love For Kids and Writing
So how does a retired pediatrician end up a children’s picture book author?
In my case, it was both fortuitous and fortunate. I love kids and I also enjoyed reading Dr. Seuss while growing up, perhaps motivating my passion for writing poems. That combination, along with parenting my own two wonderful children and getting to see, on a daily basis in my pediatric practice, the boundless imaginations and creative minds of young children,
provided the inspiration for my poems.
I was animated by the opportunity to witness the development of their amazing young minds. That motivated me to write poems that tried to capture their magical thinking and, sometimes, their thought processes as the “real” world began to impinge on the world of their fantasies. I ultimately wrote a couple dozen poems while in practice with no expectation that they might become children’s books.
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Making The Right Connections
That any of them did become children’s picture books, I owe to my friend, Ashley McKeown, a fitness trainer, mother of former patients and, now, illustrator of my three books. As a mother of two young children at the time, she encouraged me to believe that my poems were worthy of becoming the basis for children’s picture books. She also came up with the
name of my self-publishing company, Lollypop Books.
Self-publishing books is not all fun and games. I love the creative process of collaborating with the illustrator and designing the books. Marketing them is the real work and I can’t say I have mastered that yet. No one should get into this business with the expectation of making a fortune or even a living.
Only a few are truly successful in that way but many more find great satisfaction in the process and in the many good and talented people and organizations it brings you into contact with, like Connie Tanaka and the Macaroni Kid organization. Of course, there is also the hope that you are creating something that might both reflect AND encourage the wonderful imaginations of children. That is the true Holy Grail.
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Our First Published Book
As far as the individual books, our first published book, My Dog is the Tooth Fairy follows the theme of how a young child's magical thinking begins to be challenged by her emerging understanding of the "real world" and how she reconciles those seemingly incongruous worlds.
Our 2nd published book, A Gift You Don't Want, is about a boy who gets the flu and is told by his mom that his best friend "gave it to him". He cannot understand why his best friend would "give" him such a "gift" until he learns that he has "given" the flu to his sister, someone he is NOT inclined to share anything with. He comes to the realization that "Perhaps there are some things you give without knowing. You pass them along, though nothing is showing".
The second part of the book includes kid-friendly flu facts, a teaching module for parents or teachers to reinforce how children can prevent getting or giving unwanted germs (fortuitously beneficial for this time of coronavirus pandemic, since it was published shortly before that reality emerged) and a "Draw A Germ" page for children to express what they think a germ might look like.
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New Book To Be Released This Summer
We have just completed a third book that will be called “I DON’T LIKE CHORES!”. We hope to release it in late summer. It is a fun, rhyming story about a boy who has been a reluctant chore doer.
With a flurry of effort, he does all sorts of chores, often in what seem to be fantastical ways, with the hope of showing his mom he can rise above all his “Nos and Cant's”. In the end, we are left to decide whether his efforts to please his mom were real or a dream.
In a second section of the book, children and parents can answer questions about the story, express their feelings about chores, read what some other primary school children say about chores and much more. The first two books are currently available at Amazon.com and at my website, LollypopBooks.com.
Anyway, enjoy the wonderful and all too short time you have to be a parent of young children. During that time and afterward, if you want to stay "young at heart" and even in mind and body, spend as much time as you can around young children, especially reading to them and trying to see how they experience the world as reflected in their understanding of
stories.
