If you’re looking for an adorable picture book to share with your 4-8 year old granddaughter, check out the New York Times bestseller How To Babysit A Grandma.This book has been long awaited by young readers who loved How to Babysit a Grandpa.
Written by Jean Reagan and delightfully illustrated by Lee Wildish, this silly take on role reversal will have preschoolers and early-elementary children plotting their own babysitting jobs.
The plot opens as a young girl heads over to her grandma’s house for a sleepover babysitting session with the child providing clear and humorous instructions to readers on how to care for a grandma.
The little girl’s to-do list contains many choices for Grandma to select from, including a walk to the park, reading, taking photos, playing dress-up, and adding sugary sprinkles to her meal items. The child wisely allows plenty of time for Grandma to look at the pages while reading a book, peek at the stars, and choose the best spot to sleep. Any grown-up who has calmly been the object of a child’s flights of fancy will chuckle at the scenarios, as Grandma, never mugging or rolling her eyes, participates fully and patiently in all of her granddaughter’s ideas.
“When you babysit a grandma, if you’re lucky … it’s a sleepover at her house,” it begins. “What should you do when you get to her door? Put on a disguise and say, ‘GUESS WHOOOOOO?’ “
The girl is shown wearing a Groucho Marx disguise.
Author Biography
I am a children’s author living in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was born in Fairhope, Alabama, but spent most of my childhood in Japan.
Peter and I have lived in Salt Lake City, Utah for over 30 years. We started our family in 1986 when we adopted a baby boy, John. Two years later we adopted a baby girl, Jane. They shared a happy childhood. We camped, hiked, boated, but our favorite thing to do was to read stacks and stacks of library books together. Since the summer of 2000, my husband and I have served as seasonal backcountry volunteers in Grand Teton National Park.
I started writing for children in 2003. My first book, ALWAYS MY BROTHER, (2009, Tilbury House Publishers) is a story that mirrors a family tragedy that struck us. On November 3, 2005, after a challenging year, our son John died of a drug overdose at the age of nineteen. Our family has struggled to cope with his death, even as we try to honor and cherish his memory.
HOW TO BABYSIT A GRANDPA (2012, Knopf Books for Young Readers) is a humorous picture book about a little boy and his grandpa. Its companion book, HOW TO BABYSIT A GRANDMA (2014), is a sleepover story about a grandmother and her granddaughter. Both these books made the NYTimes and Indie bestseller lists.
There are four more books contracted to create a HOW-TO “series.” HOW TO SURPRISE A DAD is available March 24, 2015. I wish I could share the titles of the other ones. But, not yet!
I have also written stories for Highlights Magazine and Boys’ Quest.
Since the summer of 2000, my husband and I have served as seasonal backcountry volunteers in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
We’re assigned to a patrol cabin that has no running water or electricity, and its windows have bars to keep out the bears. To reach the cabin you hike (or canoe) four miles from the nearest parking lot. Our patrol area has twelve shoreline campsites scattered across three lakes.
We access our email several times a week by hiking to civilization. And thanks to an antenna attached to a frying pan perched on our cabin roof we have amazing cellphone reception. But because we are electrically-challenged, we check messages only once a day. If you don’t hear back from us right away, now you know why!