This month we interviewed Baby Tru – now far more than two. We hope you enjoy his recollections and updates! 1. If you have any recollection of the stories in the Little Honey books, how does your memory differ from the stories? Wow, so Little Honey and Angel have been writing seven books for seven years about a time 70 years ago! (Just kidding, it wasn't that long ago!) But all of us with happy childhoods can't help but think back on things that stood out--and help us to remember our family that have helped make us who we are today. Except, I don't remember anything because Baby Tru was just a baby!!! Except for ONE story: The Peanut Story. I remember the peanut story because Little Honey told it to me when she was babysitting me one day. (OK, I guess I do remember some things after all because I also remember the pine tree in the backyard where Little Honey hit her home run in The Baseball Story!!) Our father was a professor and when his students had to take tests, they were given a little book stapled together with a light blue cover and white, blue-lined writing paper inside. These were called bluebooks, and he brought home old ones for us to use as scrap paper for drawing and coloring. I am not sure if I remember the first time Little Honey told me The Peanut Story, but I remember when she wrote it down in a bluebook and drew my friend the peanut on the cover. Little Honey and Angel liked to make little drawings, particularly of Mr. Spock all over their school notebooks! So I was so excited when they told me they were going to publish The Peanut Story. Finally a story about Baby Tru! They asked me for some old photos of Baby Tru. But when the book came out, all the illustrations in the book show Baby Tru with the face of my own son Magnus! There goes my fifteen minutes of fame! Well, there's always a new Baby Tru! I can also tell you the story about the time Angel brought me to the YMCA with her friend, Big Tru; He let me play with a real, battery-powered megaphone. Then I shouted to the people way far away on the baseball field using the megaphone and interrupted their baseball game, and Big Tru took the megaphone back. I can also tell you the story of when Little Honey taught Baby Tru to ride a bicycle. Baby Tru could only ride a bicycle with little training wheels; he didn't know how to balance on a big bicycle. So Little Honey held the back of her big, two-wheeled bike and let me pedal and steer the handlebars. It was the first time I'd ever been on a bicycle with only two wheels! On our street there was a big hill, and Little Honey said she would run down it with me holding on to the bicycle, but you know Little Honey is a little trickster sometimes. I started going down the hill riding the big, two-wheeled bicycle! I felt safe, though, knowing Little Honey was holding on. It was so fun--I was going faster and faster with only two wheels! But soon I knew I must be going too fast for Little Honey--she must have been forced to let go in the middle of the hill somewhere as we were going down, so I risked looking backwards for just a second. But Little Honey wasn't halfway up the hill, or a quarter-way up the hill; no, she was all the way back at the top of the hill!! She'd just let me go at the very beginning! I rode down the whole hill by myself and even rode on some of the flat part of the street at the bottom --and no training wheels! It was so much fun!! And today I can still ride a bike without training wheels! 2. You now have a "Baby Tru" of your own. He has now outgrown the books but what was his response to the stories when he was younger? We used to read the Little Honey stories to Magnus every night before he'd go to sleep along with all the other children's books and he would often request different ones. I think his favorite was The Watermelon Story. Many of our friends who were having kids at this time also read to their toddlers from the Little Honey stories. 3. You are a writer and have your own blog. Tell us a little bit about that. I started a blog on Medium.com last year called "Translated from the American..." about my experiences living in France. The title comes from the fact that, despite everyone who corrected you when you were little to say you speak "English" not "American," books translated into French actually say that and specify on the title page if the book was "traduit de l'anglais" or "traduit de l'américaine."
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Tara Ebersole
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