Someone stopped me at a book fair a few weeks ago, a copy of Who Sneezed Glitter tucked under her arm, and asked which of the Poppy books had been the hardest to write. She expected the glitter one, I think, because it's the longest. The honest answer is Count to 10. Ten numbers. A board book slim enough for a baby to hold sideways in one fist. It took me the better part of a year, and I don't say that to impress anyone. Babies are the toughest editors I know.
I write for two very different people. There's the four-year-old who wants a story, with a problem and a joke and an ending she can predict by the third reading. And there's the baby on the rug who can't read a word, who'll put the book in her mouth as soon as look at it. The babies are the harder audience, and I'll happily argue about that over tea with anyone who disagrees.
What a baby does with a book
My instinct when I started was to tell stories everywhere. Beginning, middle, end. Poppy gets into trouble, Poppy gets out of it. But a one-year-old isn't reading for plot. She wants a voice she loves saying something she can predict. The pleasure is in knowing what comes next, and then being almost right.
I worked this out at a Tuesday morning baby group in the village hall, reading a draft of Count to 10 to whoever would sit still. One little girl kept turning the pages back to the three dragons, every time, ignoring everything after. Her mum apologised for her. There was nothing to apologise for. She'd found the page she wanted and the rest of the book could wait. That's a perfectly good way to read when you're one.
So Count to 10 is barely a story at all. It's closer to a chant. Ten dragons doing ten small things, one number at a time, with the same rhythm humming underneath every page so a child can feel the beat arrive before the words do. I read it aloud to myself in the kitchen several hundred times before I trusted it. Anywhere I stumbled, the line went. That's the whole method, if I have one: read it out, trip over it, fix whatever tripped me.
Rhyme, and knowing when to stop showing off
I love a rhyme. Too much, probably. The trap waiting for anyone who writes in verse for babies is that the person who buys the book is a grown-up, and it's very easy to write lines that make grown-ups smile at their own cleverness. A toddler doesn't care that you found a heroic rhyme nobody asked for. She cares about sounds she can chew on: big round vowels, soft endings, words she's about to say herself.
So when I edit, I listen for the places where I'm being clever rather than clear. If a line is a joke for the adult at the expense of the rhythm, it goes. The grown-ups get a few jokes in the glitter book anyway. Babies are tuning their ears to English, and I'd rather hand them the easy sounds.
How Colours of the Rainbow learned to calm down
The first version of Colours of the Rainbow had a little story for every colour. Red had Poppy warming her toes by a fire, orange had her juggling satsumas, and so on all the way round. It was, in retrospect, a book about me enjoying my own jokes. My editor was kind about it. My mother was less kind. Both of them said the same thing in the end: the baby who points at a page and shouts "red" is doing something enormous, and the book should get out of her way.
What's left is a colour, a thing that colour belongs to, and Poppy. That's all. I'm prouder of that book than of almost anything I've written, and there's hardly a sentence in it.
Why Count along with Poppy hands over the controls
With Count along with Poppy I wanted the child in charge rather than me. The book asks questions and then waits, which is a strange thing for a page to do. How many eggs in the nest? How many stars above the hill? My nephew was the first proper tester. He was two and a half, and he counted wrong on purpose, gleefully, watching my face for the gasp. The book survived being mangled. That felt like the point. If a game only works when the child plays it correctly, it isn't a game. It's a test, and nobody wants to sit an exam before they can talk.
The listener at the other end of the sofa
Then there's the older one, the child who can read a little and wants more. Who Sneezed Glitter is really for her, though it's also for every parent who's ever found craft glitter in a shoe three weeks after the project ended. Poppy's great sneeze came out of a real afternoon in this house, involving a tub of gold glitter, a helpful toddler, and a carpet I've made my peace with. Some things you can't make up. You can only tidy up and then write them down.
Most nights in a real family, of course, you don't get one reader and one book. You get a baby who wants the chant again and a four-year-old who wants the plot, and both of them want the ending to be the same ending as last night. That's the other reason the two kinds of books exist side by side. Somebody gets the rhyme, somebody gets the story, and everyone stays up five minutes later than planned.
On reading aloud badly
One last thing, and then I'll stop. You don't need funny voices. You don't need to perform. I get letters from parents apologising for their reading voice, and it breaks my heart a little, because the reading voice a child wants is yours. The one they hear at breakfast. Wobbly is fine. Tired is fine. If you manage one page before someone rolls away to chew a wooden spoon, that page counted.
If there's a baby in your house, Colours of the Rainbow and the two counting books were made for exactly this stretch of life, the chewable stretch. And if there's an older one listening in, wanting something with a plot and a punchline, that's what the glitter sneeze is for.