Marriage and Children's Books, featuring "If You Give A Zach A Phone"

            On January 2^nd, Daniel and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary—our second one in Ethiopia, our third spent eating Ethiopian food.

            The pair of us loves to read. We love to write. We love children. We love reading to and writing for children. In our six years together, we’ve co-written three children’s books. Allow us to introduce them to you.

            The first was The Legend of Hickory Shagbark, a riveting tale about an old witch (Bo-Gunny Curtis) who brings a tree (Hickory) to life to do her bidding (burning down the town’s candy factory, because she hates butterscotch and children). It takes the likes of young Frisbee Jefferson (who “is as virtuous as he is adventurous”) to stop Hickory and to help him put his strength toward something valuable (hurling the witch’s shack into the Mississippi). Though we wrote this together during our early dating days, I illustrated and arranged this story into its own book form as my wedding gift to Daniel. [The authors listed: Daniel Luttrull and Danielle Steadman.]

            Our second story begins:

Ages ago on a grand little hill

in a place known as Southern Peru

lived a spiky sort

of creation, of course,

who looked nothing like me or like you.

             The Legend of the Stagasaurus is a very loose analogy of our relationship—recounting how various nay-sayers once told a young girl (or, stegasaurus: Sally) she’d never find a boy (or, stagosaurus: Sal) who met her high, counter-culture standards, who shared her joys and principles, and who loved her at the same time. If you can’t guess, against all odds, the two dinosaurs do in fact meet and fall in love, proving the whole town wrong. We wrote this story during our engagement, as a gift for our parents, for providing us with a lovely wedding; we read it to them and our guests at our rehearsal dinner on January 1. [The authors listed: for the first time, Daniel Luttrull and Danielle Luttrull.]

            Here’s a bit of human interest for you: Daniel and I shared our first kiss (his first, my first, our first—and after eight months of dating) during the writing of The Legend of Hickory Shagbark. What’s more romantic than literature?, ask we two Writing majors. What I didn’t know for sure until today, and what has lingered in my thoughts for five years—Why can’t I remember the exact date of our first kiss? What happened to that calendar where I wrote it down? I want another day to celebrate!—Microsoft Word just gladly and beautifully answered for me. I knew it was the last week of July. Just recently I asked Daniel, hopefully, “Do you think these two important days could be the same?” And they indeed are. I thought I could feel tears coming on when I saw the date listed just now, but I was also unsurprised. I instinctively knew what it would say anyway. The day was July 25, 2008.

            Which brings us to our third story. July 25, 2012 is a tad more special—it brought our first nephew into the world, into Mentor, Ohio, and into loving arms. Zachary Alexander Kelley. (We’ll never forget our first kiss date again.)

            This autumn we wrote If You Give A Zach A Phone, an obvious play on Laura Joffe Numeroff’s “If You Give A…” series, including If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, If You Give A Pig A Pancake, If You Give A Moose A Muffin, etc. Her stories are beautifully cyclical, beginning with giving, say, a cookie to a mouse on the first page, which leads the little guy to request various other items and services (milk, a straw, a napkin), until finally, by the last page, he’s in need of another cookie.

            When we went home last summer, we met Zachary for the first time. At 11 months, he was a pro at telecommunications. Anything that even faintly resembled a phone he would grab, hold to his ear, and say, “Hello?” (The “hello” got progressively clearer as days went on.) Two weeks ago my sister sent us a video of him holding her iPhone. Christine says, “Take a picture of yourself, Zach. And say cheese.” Zach holds the phone up and away from him, horizontally aloft, smiles, and says, “Cheese!” This boy’s already taking selfies on command. (He’s incredibly smart!)

            Last year Christine mailed us some blank children’s-sized books, for the very purpose of, despite the ocean between us, finding a way to be closer to our nephew. That’s exactly what we attempted with If You Give A Zach A Phone. We also recorded ourselves each reading it aloud to him; Daniel even added in fancy chords at the end of each page (Remember read-along books?). In other words, we should go into the book business.

            For the record, my illustration skills are not naturally this accurate. Daniel taught me a trick he learned in high school art class—if you put an image on a glass, and put a light under the glass, you can trace beautifully. Or, in our case, if you tape Zach’s photo to our living room window, and stack behind it David Copperfield, John Donne’s poems, and an Agatha Christie murder mystery, positioning a flashlight atop the books—well, you get the picture. It took us about two months. Please note, I've already apologized to Daniel and John for some of their portraits, i.e. eyebrow crayon mishaps. [The authors listed: Uncle Daniel and Aunt Danielle.]

            We hope you learn along with Zach as you read his story, and also get a glimpse of the difficulty of missing out on the earliest years of the ones you love and miss so dearly (the plight of Peace Corps Volunteers, missionaries, and servicemen and women across the globe).