Jellybean Story
When my husband, John, and I decided to have children, one of the parts I looked forward to the most was reading out loud to them. My own childhood had been shaped by the books that I was introduced to by grade school teachers and our local librarian. When my son Ned was three months old, I read P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins to him, lest he accidentally see the movie before reading the book. And — oh, what luck — both children were beautifully receptive to anything I chose to read aloud to them. Until.
We had traipsed happily through Mary Norton’s Borrowers series, and all of The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as the Winnie-the-Pooh books and pretty nearly all of Beatrix Potter. But for some reason that was never clear, they flatly rejected The Wind in the Willows, even though I would try offering it in little tidbits at exactly appropriate times. How can a child refuse to hear the story of Mole and Rat’s boating picnic when they themselves are eating a picnic by the side of the beautiful Cuyahoga River?
When they then also panicked and hid during the very first suspenseful chapter of The Hobbit, I began to get desperate. If they didn’t delight in my favorite children’s books anymore, surely we were standing on the threshold of surly adolescence! And them only 6 and 8!
Which is when — I am not ashamed to say it — we resorted to bribery. And this is how our year-old family tradition of the Jellybean Story began.
Beginning with the rejected Hobbit, I started offering them a single jellybean for every page of the book they would permit me to read aloud to them.
Okay, so at first it did strike me as sort of pathetic — even disturbingly controlling — of me. Why not let them simply choose their own books? The answer is that of course I did let them choose their own books. Before I was their mother, I was a public librarian, after all. They selected and inhaled books by the boxful every single week. But still. How could my offspring not like The Hobbit?
Fortunately, the good people at Jelly Belly brought them around.
Since we began this method for our bedtime story, we’ve shared some great and challenging things. We read Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth just before Christmas so that they could follow Wayne Turney’s stage adaptation when we went to see it at Actors Summit in Hudson. As a result, I suspect they grasped more of the nuances than many adults in the audience. We’ve read old chestnuts like the Little House books and some beautiful but less-often read stuff like T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose. And we’ve recently finished a very interesting project — comparing the original 1922 text of Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle with the recent text edited by Patricia and Fredrick McKissack. We had a terrific family conversation about why Lofting’s original conclusion to the fourth chapter of part three, although admittedly hilarious, might be off-putting to some modern readers. Look! We’ve bred little English majors after all! Bliss!
During all of this, we’ve had some help from some very useful sources. There was Jelly Belly itself, of course. We’ve experimented with substitute products, but when you’re dealing with book after book, with 200 or 300 pages each, you really do need 50 different flavors, even if Wild Blackberry does taste exactly like bath soap, and Mango has been nicknamed “Cleaning Fluid” by our family. If you accidentally pop either of these (or the even more odious Garlic) into your mouth without looking, you automatically get to pick a better-tasting “chaser.” But many other flavors are just superb, such as Pink Grapefruit, Plum, and the divine Juicy Pear. Besides the variety, the small size of the jellybeans means we’re not sending the kids to bed with a head-splitting sugar buzz.
Our source for the jellybeans has also been a great discovery. Our first bags of beans from the grocery store tended to have far too many banana, coconut, and other less-desirable (to Fratus readers, at least) flavors. So we went looking for somewhere to buy preferred flavors in bulk. B.A.Sweeties on Brookpark Road was a dream come true. All 50 flavors! By the bucket full! Plus about a million kinds of candy we never saw before. Plus it’s a family-owned business since 1950. All good.
But the best add-on to our read-aloud experience has been the laptop computer with wireless Internet access. Back in my library school days, there was a lot of talk about whether electronic books would ever become more popular than hard copies. General consensus among fiction lovers at the time was no. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll talk about how our family is already enjoying the many ways in which connectivity enhances and improves the experience of story-reading, and how it may be even be preparing our kids to be stronger, better informed, more critical readers.