My children have a hard time going to sleep at night unless everything is just right, so this book struck me as funny on a couple of different levels.
Patrick is having a sleepover with his granny, his very first ever. He’s excited, but there’s just one little problem. When Granny tells him to get ready for bed, he realizes that he doesn’t have a bed at Granny’s house. When he tells her . . .
“What?” cries Granny, and she immediately runs out to her workshop and builds him a bed out of trees she has cut down from her property. When she hears he doesn’t have a blanket, she goes out to the hills and shears sheep and dyes the wool and spins the yarn and knits it into a blanket. Upon learning that he has no pillow, she goes out to the hen house and collects the feathers, then sews the pillow herself. Then she uses the curtains for fabric to sew Patrick a giant teddy bear, the likes of which have never been seen before.
Throughout the book, her purse is right handy, her pearls never stray out of place, and her determination never falters. Where most women would have put the kid on the couch with a sleeping bag, she perseveres, proving that with a grandma, nothing is too hard!
Finally Granny has provided everything Patrick needs. She tells him one last time to go to bed, only to hear him reply, “But it’s morning.”
For the first time in the whole book, we see Granny perturbed as she goes running off the page, crying.
If your children have a hard time sleeping at night, or if you have a Granny with a bit of spunk to her, this is a book you’ll thoroughly enjoy.
(This book was published in 1999 by Dial Books and was illustrated by Adrian Johnson.)
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“Humphrey” Books by Sally Hunter