Week 6: From Blog to Book
Emma K -
Welcome back readers! Today I wanted to share some background information about the origin of “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child”, as I continue the illustration process!
As previously mentioned in Week 1, the text of the picture book was adapted from one of my mother’s blog posts.
Her blog, titled “Being Myself”, is centered around her reflections regarding life’s small but impactful moments, and each post reveals a new glimpse into her mind. I have always known that I got my creative inclination from my mom; she studied interior design for a while and love to read and write. When she first showed me her blog, the one that stood out most to me was a post called “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child” (which became the title of this book).
It talked about how our family was met with so much kindness and care at every stage in our lives ever since she and my father moved to the United States. As a young immigrant couple with two kids and a tight budget, they often worried about how to enrich their children’s lives like other families could. Even though we couldn’t afford extracurricular activities, we treated parks, libraries, and museums as if they were our second home. We picked out pumpkins from local patches in the fall, learned how to rollerblade on the ruddy running track across the street, and even went hiking in the mountains behind our apartment complex every once in a while.
When I read this post, I realized how much impact the environment had on the person I am today, and how central the idea of gratitude and community is to my identity. I proposed the idea of writing a story based on this post, centered around gratitude. My mom and I both thought that it would make a wonderful picture book teaching an important value for both children and adults alike, and so it became a big passion project of ours.
Since then, it had always been in the back of my mind, but I never had the chance to go further than attempting to adapt the text to a picture book format. But now, I’m so glad that I’ll finally able to dedicate time to this project and bring it to life!
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this little reflection! See you next week!
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