Writing about seven-year-olds allowed me to time-travel back to my kid-hood and my daughters’, handing me a vacation from teenager-land. Then, as my own children fell from the peaks of childhood into the tribulations of adolescence, Ivy and Bean stopped being a record of what was happening in my house and started being an escape hatch. In What’s the Big Idea, I find the kid in her second-grade class who decided that the solution to global warming was to give the animals a boost by making himself dumber, which he intended to achieve by banging his head against the wall every morning. Our cheap used Ivy & Bean books come with free shipping in the UK. In No News Is Good News, there’s the bizarre passion for wax-covered cheese that swept through her third grade. Buy the whole collection of books in the Ivy & Bean series online from World of Books. We called her the Slumlord.Īs the devious three-year-old grew, I can see her stories arriving in the books too. Ivy’s doll collection, which features in multiple books, throws me right back to my despair at the sprawling “doll tenement” in my older kid’s room. In the third book, Ivy’s obsession with girl paleontologist Mary Anning echoes just such an obsession in my house-or rather, in my yard, which was the site of a huge fossil dig. Then we’d argue about the definition of work, and then, after about 15 minutes, she’d trot away, completely satisfied by the outcome of her efforts, and I would put my head down on my desk.

Then the three-year-old would say, “What you doing, Mommy?”Īnd then I’d yank open the door and tell her Yes, I did work, I most certainly did, and if she would just go downstairs and play, I could get my work done. There was usually a three-year-old breathing heavily outside my door in those days. The big difference is that when I typed that first line, there was almost certainly a three-year-old breathing heavily outside my door. There was only one file cabinet, for the same reason.

There weren’t as many books in it, because I hadn’t written many books yet. I was sitting in the office at the top of my house, the same one I’m sitting in now, but it looked different. In 2003, I wrote the first line of the first draft of the first book in the Ivy and Bean series: “Before Bean met Ivy, she didn’t like her.”

Ivy and bean the book