- April 25, 2024
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Kennedy, age 5, decided to write a book the other day. I helped her staple together some printer paper for the pages and a file folder for the cover, and she was thrilled. A real book!
The only problem was what to write.
“How about a book about an animal?” I suggested. She rejected dog, cat, squirrel, but she settled on a dinosaur.
For the title page, she began by asking me how to spell the words, “There once.”
I gave her one letter at a time, and that was enough for the first day.
Day two produced another three words: “Was a dinosaur.”
I figured she would forget all about it.
Soon we became busy working on a family project, repainting our kitchen cabinets. My job was to take the finish off the wood panels using an electric sander in the garage; my wife, Hailey, led the painting project in the kitchen with the older kids.
All sweaty and dusty, I opened the door from the garage to the house, and there was Kennedy. She was waiting patiently, sitting in a little wooden chair, her book on her lap and her pencil in her hand.
“You give it to me, and I’ll take it to Mom,” she said, putting the book and pencil down.
So I handed her the panel, and she disappeared behind the door.
A few minutes later, I finished another panel, and there she was again with her pencil, using her spare moments to fill more pages in her book.
A few days later, I was in my room, working on a story for the newspaper, and she wandered in and sat on my bed with her book and peppered me with questions:
“How do you spell ‘fruit snacks’?”
“How do you spell ‘snow’?”
“How do you make it sound like someone is shouting?”
She also illustrated the book, with a family building a snowman and then watching it melt.
“What happened to the dinosaurs?” I asked.
She looked puzzled.
“It’s called ‘The Book about a Dinosaur,’ but there aren’t any dinosaurs at the end,” I said. I pointed to the picture of the family with the snowman.
“Dad, those are dinosaurs!”
“Oh,” I said. “Got it.”
When it was finished, she beamed with pride and raced off to show Mom. That night, Kennedy fell asleep knowing she had finished her first book, which sat in its rightful place on the bookshelf.
