The Library Vault

As many parents already know, dinnertime and bedtime in a house with young children can be fraught. There’s screaming, kicking, and running on a regular basis – and the kids don’t behave well, either!

But, seriously, trying to get a six-year-old to sit down and eat her dinner instead of running in circles around the dining room table feels like a nightly marathon for me. I need a parrot to repeat “Please sit down” so that I don’t go hoarse saying it a hundred times a night. To complicate matters, my 1st grader needs to take a nightly medication that she hates the taste of. Even better: to take that medication without vomiting from an upset stomach, she has to actually eat a substantive amount of food first. It’s pretty much a recipe for nightly rebellion.

That was, until I brought home a Junie B. Jones book bag kit from Russell Library.

Shortly before the pandemic, Russell Library’s Youth and Family Learning department started putting together Book Bag Kits. They feature books on different themes: board books on sleep or animals, picture books about farms or colors, early reader books featuring Legos or the Spanish language, and many more. We have kits on book series like The Notebook of Doom and The Babysitters Club Graphic Novel. We also have kits (Stay on Track Packs) to help kids do things like learn to tell time, write in cursive, and practice mindfulness. We even have three Family Game Night kits. They contain board games and card games.

As first the head of cataloging and now the head of the children’s department, I’ve been helping to catalog these kits since their inception. As a mother of two young children, I am also always on the lookout for resources to check out for my own family. For over a year, I’d been trying to get my 1st grader to read chapter books. She loved picture books, but rejected books with mostly words. She wouldn’t even let me read Bunnicula out loud to her at Halloween.

Thanks to the advice of a friend and fellow patron/parent, I had already brought home several picture-heavy chapter books (Narwhal and Jelly and Hedgehogs). They instantly hooked her. My daughter now just loves narwhals, and is slowly filling our house with as many stuffed versions of them as possible. The success made me brave.

One Saturday, while I checked in items from the return cart, I ran across the first Junie B. Jones book bag kit. Another friend had recently recommended the books, as her own first grader loved them. I had already been eyeing these short chapter books with their curious titles like Boo, And I Mean It!, Turkeys We Have Loved and Eaten, and Junie B. Jones is Not a Crook. The Junie B. Jones series post-dated my own childhood. Now, as I handled the book bag kit, I paged through one of the first titles in the series: Junie B. Jones and A Little Monkey Business. In case you’re not familiar with the cover, it shows a little girl climbing on a baby’s crib and making monkey gestures. The cover described a book about a kindergartner who gets a new baby brother – something my daughter could very much relate to. I brought the book kit home, crossing my fingers.

That evening, before dinner, I showed my daughter the book and told her what it was about. It immediately captured her interest. She has always been unusually obsessed with babies and in becoming a big sister. I told her I would read it to her while she took her medicine, if she could stay seated during dinner. To my amazement, she did.

This probably doesn’t sound like a big accomplishment to most people. I should add the detail that her “medication” requires that she completely chew and swallow four large pills (actually peanut M&Ms, believe it or not). While most of us would eat these in about 10 seconds flat, she hates their taste. More than that, she hates that she has to do it. Even more than that, she hates that she has to eat dinner before eating the M&Ms. The entire process had been known to take over two hours.

That book bag kit changed our lives. My daughter instantly became addicted to Junie B. Jones. So did my husband and I. I honestly haven’t laughed so hard for years. You never know what Junie B. will get up to: sticking a leash on a dead fish for Pet Day, conjuring up a chicken phobia, or getting stuck in a parrot-shaped swimming ring named “Squeezer” for a week. Reading something silly out loud makes it that much funnier, and many parents know that the best children’s books have as much in them for the adults as for the kids. Each Junie B. Jones book has moments like those, and thankfully there are 28 books in the series. Because of Russell’s book bag kits, I already had the first seven books in the series in the house. We started bingeing on them right away.

Instead of hours to dread, dinner and bedtime suddenly became hours to anticipate – for all of us, not just my child. Before Junie B., my husband and I took turns shouldering the ordeal of medication. The drama of getting the food and medication down her belly often dragged into bedtime and made that miserable as well. Now, we compete to take on extra medication/bedtime duties so that we can have the fun of reading Junie B. Jones with her. Our youngest child has benefited from a much more fun dinner and bedtime, and I’m sure that seeing his big sister addicted to books will rub off on him in due time. I have even been known to neglect the dishes in order to hear the hysterical plot lines.

Junie B. books have taken over my house. You can find copies in nooks and crannies everywhere. The night that I wrote this post, I found one on my dining room chair and another under the covers of my bed. Since I wrote this post several months ago, my daughter has been exploring other chapter books besides Junie B. Jones. The dinnertime/bedtime improvement has lasted.

It’s a fabulous feeling to suddenly have your first grader addicted to chapter books. The love of reading has even seeped into our weekends. We don’t have time to finish a Junie B. every week night, but on weekends we now have special Friday and Saturday evenings where my daughter can stay up late (a whole half an hour!) to finish her current volume. As a family, we’ve begun looking forward to the weekend readings all week.

If that’s not a reading success story, I don’t know what is. Now, our biggest problem is getting her to stop reading.