Dads on Books

Mike Walker 0:02
Okay, so intro.

David Patrick 0:05
Intro to our books. We love books. Our girls love the books. We love our girls books and books.

Mike Walker 0:12
I do want to take the introduction of the book.

David Patrick 0:15
Yes, we chose Olivia helps with Christmas Harder, and I chose it for a couple of reasons. Number one, a personal reason is you gave us Olivia early on in Delaney, my oldest daughter's book reading history. So you're the one that introduced us to Olivia. Getting us? Yeah. And we and by we, I mean Monica, my wife Delaney, and I loved Olivia so much. We bought more books. And for years, Olivia with Christmas has been my favorite Olivia book. It's probably been my most favorite of all the little kids books that we have read to them. I think it's absolutely hilarious.

Mike Walker 0:52
I think so too. I really enjoy There's also the TV show and it's it's in the same style as the art and the book, but I really enjoy the characters at It's I don't know, it's so simple, but it's just kind of true to life. Like you're not a kid who is excited about doing all these weird, maybe not weird things, just kid things. So it's kind of cool anyway.

David Patrick 1:21
When you were mentioning the art and it's so simple, were you referring to the TV show or the book? Both.

Mike Walker 1:26
Yeah, I think it translated well. The animation I really feel like stays true to the book, which I think is excellent. Yes. Let's talk about the book that we chose and then we can get into all of that stuff. So David chose for us. Olivia helps with Christmas, which is not timely if you're listening to this when it comes out.

David Patrick 1:51
Unless you're about eight months behind.

Mike Walker 1:55
I said.

David Patrick 1:57
Yes, but I guess I chose it because I just love it. It's awesome.

Mike Walker 2:01
A tell us a little bit about the story.

David Patrick 2:05
So I'm assuming Olivia and her family are staying somewhere, not their home, because there's lots of snow outside. It looks like some kind of house they may have rented. It's very wintry and it's Christmas Eve because they're busy getting everything done. And last minute shopping they mentioned and Olivia wants to help with Christmas, hence the name, but she's also always wanted to be in charge or be in control. What could possibly go wrong?

Mike Walker 2:33
What could possibly go wrong?

David Patrick 2:36
Pretty much everything. Yeah, but.

Mike Walker 2:39
In a fun, lighthearted way.

David Patrick 2:41
Exactly. I mean, the very first two pages, they've been out shopping, they're busy and Olivia was exhausted. Yet there is still so much to do. I mean, I'm a 57 year old dad. I'm like, You know what? I'm tired of stuff to do. It'll get done. No, not Olivia. There are so much to do.

Mike Walker 2:57
Got to do it now.

David Patrick 2:58
Takes it upon herself. And I just read it again. Who knows how many times. And again, it's almost every single set. I'm going to help with everything. And then again, what could go wrong? On of the first things that does is hilarious. She's feeding her baby brother a blueberry pie and her mother says, Olivia, But wait, he that's going to make him I thought, blueberry pie all over the floor. And the baby. That sick pops. Yeah, exactly. And what I love about it is when you read it, you can hear all that. Yeah, you can hear the pause and the comic timing. It's going to make him and it doesn't have a flare in there anywhere between the two dots. But, you know, it's there. And there are countless examples of that in the book. And it's what made it so much fun for me to read to my girls, because you know me, if there's no fluff in there, I'm putting it in absolute.

Mike Walker 3:50
But whatever your laugh is, but I think pretty awesome.

David Patrick 3:55
It's pretty. It's blue and requires a mop. But yeah, but the point is, whether you're into lots of sound effects or not, this is writing that you can hear.

Mike Walker 4:06
Absolutely.

David Patrick 4:07
Yeah. Whether it's a novel for an adult or a kid's book like this, you can hear everything and it's absolutely brilliant.

Mike Walker 4:12
And I think along those lines, I think it's just the conversational tone just makes it stand out even more.

David Patrick 4:22
Exactly.

Mike Walker 4:23
I'm looking at the page right now that we're talking about, and I'm just drawn into all of the characters and the flirting

and the way they actually look like pigs. You know, it's Olivia the pig.

David Patrick 4:41
Yes.

Mike Walker 4:41
And it's not they don't try and make it super cutesy. It's just pigs. And that in itself is cute.

David Patrick 4:50
That's funny. You bring that up because I barely noticed it because the characters are so real. But now that you're talking about that, I love Porky Pig. I love Pepper. And this is different.

Mike Walker 5:00
Totally. I agree.

David Patrick 5:01
No particular styles and this is very realistic. For those of you just listening and not looking at the book, it's all it's all drawn in, you know, ink with light shading. There's not a lot of colors. There's often only two colors on many of the spreads. A lot of red and green. Don't know why.

Mike Walker 5:19
But it sounds very Christmasy.

David Patrick 5:21
Exactly. And even the blue of the blueberry pie before it's blue, but it's you know, as you said earlier, it's very simple and it's very realistic. Yeah, but then there are some cool stylized stuff and then moving on to something else.

Mike Walker 5:37
Okay, Mama, one of my favorite. And I wonder if it's something that I also would like to point out. But go on.

David Patrick 5:45
Let's find out. One of my favorite things that he does a couple, three times in the book is when the kids are watching and waiting for Santa. Okay. And a few pages in at the bottom, the three pigs there. There's Olivia, her younger brother Ian, and then baby pig.

Mike Walker 6:03
William.

David Patrick 6:03
William. Thank you. And the three, remember?

Mike Walker 6:07
Because mom said it on the last page, we talked about.

David Patrick 6:10
No.

Mike Walker 6:11
William's going to awful work. Now I've already forgotten.

David Patrick 6:16
I me two. Oh, you're paying attention. I like that. But this is the page that does a couple of things I love. They're looking out the window, and that is definitely a photograph of rain on glass. It's not the simple animation.

Mike Walker 6:29
Absolutely.

David Patrick 6:30
And at the bottom it goes. Da da da da. 5 p.m.. Da da da da da. Santa. Watch. Don't act at that. No, enter that. At that rate it's like a ticker tape or something like that and it's hilarious. And once again, it breaks 5 p.m. ten watch, no center ring. And you can just hear that they're looking at it and it's brilliant.

Mike Walker 6:49
That's phenomenal.

David Patrick 6:50
Yeah, I like that he does that a few times.

Mike Walker 6:52
I looked at that, too, and and I thought it was funny, but I don't think I drew on the ticker tape. But now that you say it's like, Oh, totally. I totally see that coming off of some weird Beverly Hillbillies show where they have some machine that spits out the ticker tape.

David Patrick 7:08
And for me, it was like the Walter Winchell radio kind of guy, you know, that kind of thing. His voice. Yeah, 5:00, 10:00, whatever. Right. You know, something like that. I don't know. But that's me. I different voices, but I could go on and countless examples of phenomenal comic timing.

Mike Walker 7:25
If we turn to the next page. The very first thing that I noticed when I turned to the page was not the words on the page. It's the fact that in the middle of the page there's a tree and it looks beautiful. But then it looks out of proportion all of the sudden. And then I notice a saw. And then I look at the tree again and I see that, Oh, part of the tree has been sawed off. Hmm. Very helpful.

David Patrick 7:55
Are you looking at a digital copy of the book?

Mike Walker 7:58
I am.

David Patrick 7:59
Okay. For those of you who have analog copies, a paper, I'm going to show this to you and you first turn to that spread. There is the tree and it's little tree table because Olivia helped set the table and Mommy says, Where did you ever find that perfect little dot, dot, dot tree?

Mike Walker 8:22
Oh, Oh, oh, look at that.

David Patrick 8:26
And you don't see the saw and the sort of tree until you go. That looks like a really nice setting for the table. Yeah, but you can just go tree.

Mike Walker 8:37
And I'm looking at the digital copy because that's what I have. I couldn't find mine when I was cleaning my basement. And don't go back and listen to the first episode because I was still cleaning my basement and couldn't find anything. But now that you say that and you showed that to me, I'm like, Oh my God, I remember that. That makes way more sense than the digital copy. But the digital copy, they do. Okay with it. Not great, but that's okay.

David Patrick 9:07
Yeah, but you know, there's just so many funny things like that and we don't want to reveal everything is you haven't read the book. We want you to enjoy these jokes yourself for the first time. I wouldn't say spoiler alert. It's not exactly major plot points.

Mike Walker 9:21
No, there's not a major plot. It's Christmas and kids are waiting for Santa and they don't want Santa coming down the chimney that has a fire in the fireplace. So. But it's cute. It's it's a lot of fun and it's Olivia.

David Patrick 9:39
Exactly.

Mike Walker 9:40
I do want to say I'm flipping to the right page, and it's a little later in the book. And this kind of goes to the rain page that you brought up.

David Patrick 9:51
Okay.

Mike Walker 9:52
And you get in Father and I'll just read the scene. She would never get sleep until she woke up and saw it was morning Olivia ran to get her brothers. It shows her waking up in bed. But then there's a picture of a skier. Yep. That is staab. Yep. I'm guessing that's how it said, because I don't really know. It says Ski Gstaad. Yes, which is in Switzerland. And if anybody thinks I'm wrong, tell me, because that's what the Google told me.

David Patrick 10:29
Google to Google can't be wrong.

Mike Walker 10:31
It's on the Internet. It must be right. True. Yeah. So I just thought it was funny because it has the feel of a more real picture, like the rain picture that you brought up before.

David Patrick 10:45
I'm glad you brought that up because that's one of my favorite parts of the entire book. If someone said to me before we even chose this book, Olivia helps with Christmas, I would just say Skittish Dad, because it's funny for a number of reasons. At first you go, okay, it's not a photograph. The thing is, it's a poster on the wall. So it is just like a photograph because it's very realistic as a poster on the wall. And it really stands out because of the simple nature of the art. And it's hysterical. Yes, it's random, but it's not. Because if you think about it, maybe this is a an Airbnb or a hostel and they would have something like that on the wall, right?

Mike Walker 11:22
Totally.

David Patrick 11:23
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Walker 11:24
That was the thing that kind of just made me go, why is there like, I'm thinking about it more because we're talking about it. But when I read it this time versus all of the other times I've read it, I just looked at it and went, Did I ever notice that there was a skiing poster? I don't know.

David Patrick 11:47
Whereas for me, I know that, I I mean, again, years and years and years of noticing and remembering that. But what's cool about it also is is it does what The Little Mermaid did with Disney. That was the first time they realized who brings the kids to those movies?

Mike Walker 12:02
Parents, parents.

David Patrick 12:03
Let's put stuff in that the kids won't get or notice but will make the parents laugh. And that ski Gstaad is one of those things. Yeah.

Mike Walker 12:11
Absolutely.

David Patrick 12:12
The kid has no idea what that is, but I just it's random and it's you. You get that, you know?

Mike Walker 12:17
And now our kids know that they want to go the coast to ski. However, that probably won't happen because we don't really ski. But our parents, Chris and Elisabeth, do ski. And when I was thinking about talking about that in particular, I thought of them.

David Patrick 12:35
I know two other people that, you know, who ski, David and Monica ski, and we are going skiing for spring break in less than two weeks. We're just Todd

Or maybe it's Beaver Creek in Colorado. Oh.

Mike Walker 12:53
No. I've got I've got a story about Beaver Creek. When I was in high school, had to take Oklahoma history, I think it was ninth grade. And I knew nothing about Oklahoma because I had just moved there and I got switched into into the class because they said, Oh, you have to have this class to graduate.

David Patrick 13:16
I was like, Oh crap.

Mike Walker 13:18
So I went into the class and like the second day there's a test. Like, I haven't I haven't read anything about Oklahoma history. And there was all these questions about rivers and stuff, and I answered Beaver Creek on all of them.

David Patrick 13:33
I dreamed of doing.

Mike Walker 13:36
Oh, I think I, I passed the class. I did not pass that test.

David Patrick 13:43
That's okay.

Mike Walker 13:44
The tests on that, it was like it's only your second day.

David Patrick 13:47
It's totally day two of stuff. That's awesome. Oh, man. Another Another great thing about this book is that it continues with the some of the same setups of jokes, because there's another thing where the pages fold out and it's the same thing Finish your breakfast and then you can open your presents under the fact that, that. And then two things that were amazing happened. Three,

two things. It's a great call back. Same word, same larger font, but also this right here. I've experienced that.

Mike Walker 14:22
Yes, absolutely. And stood on both sides.

David Patrick 14:26
Yes. Oh, my gosh. Captures children. wrote in my pre show notes and I put myself and mine. This is a moment that captures both my own childhood and my experience as a parent. And the different perspective is this My wife and I, if any kids are listening, cover your ears right now. Hey, kids, can you hear me? If hear me.

Mike Walker 14:50
I can't hear you.

David Patrick 14:51
Okay, good. It's not my fault. We would spend countless hours setting up that stuff and making it perfect. And the presents are perfect. They're not just grouped by child and just grouped by who they're from. And they're perfect. It looks perfect. And then 2 seconds, that work is torn to shreds and there's nothing better. It's just it's so awesome. And this picture, this is one of many examples of where he captures the feeling, the emotion, the memory. And for me, as a parent with kids who celebrate Christmas again, my own childhood and now my experience of it as a parent, that's brilliant. I just love it. Oh, it's also funny.

Mike Walker 15:30
It's funny. It's very funny. And it's also funny because, yes, there were the years of just pandemonium and ripping paper off and the excitement of that. But when you were talking about that, I thought back to before that when they were like one and two years old and how long it took to open all the presents because every one sent a present. The grandparents and my kids through divorces and things things had nine grandparents at 1.4.

David Patrick 16:08
Wow.

Mike Walker 16:08
Yeah, five. Yeah, we're down five,

which is sad, but it makes for a much faster Christmas.

David Patrick 16:19
Much more efficient.

Mike Walker 16:20
I remember sitting there going, Oh my God, than ever. And I don't remember ever being like this. Like I would rip paper off one and move to the next. Maybe I would look at the box before I threw it to the side and started on the next.

David Patrick 16:38
Oh, it's all about the ripping in the drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. I love it. Janet. Also, I love the smudge catching of the smudges.

Mike Walker 16:47
What do you mean by that?

David Patrick 16:49
You should ask Mike. There are a couple of times where he conveys motion, he being Ian Faulconer, the author of the book that we forgot to mention at the beginning.

Mike Walker 16:57
All right, so we can go back and post and do that.

David Patrick 17:01
Excellent. We'll fix it in post, literally early. This is when Olivia goes outside with one of her new gifts, the skis.

Mike Walker 17:09
And she can ski Gstaad She's skiing.

David Patrick 17:12
Gstaad But there's not one word on this entire spread. A spread is two pages. I'm a yearbook geek, so I know that. But if you see hear her flying, this is Smudge. And he must have had fun just taking his wrist or his fist pump. His hand got.

Mike Walker 17:28
Totally.

David Patrick 17:29
To create that slide. It's just one of the little tiny stylistic choices that he makes that are really, really funny.

Mike Walker 17:36
And then on the same page, when you look at her as she has completed her ski jump

on her face, the smudge goes straight down. Yes,

she jumped and gravity took hold and pulled her up.

David Patrick 17:58
He tried to defy gravity and gravity to fight her.

Mike Walker 18:01
Yes.

David Patrick 18:01
It's just brilliant. And there's 8 billion billion other hilarious things in this, any you want to point out, Because every time you do, I'm trying to do that page and we're on the same page. Literally.

Mike Walker 18:14
The one thing that I cracked up about is Olivia and Ian worked all afternoon to make a snowman, and they're rolling snowballs, each one of them separately. And then on the very next page in the same spread, it says Olivia dressed it and it took a second, but I was like, Oh, where did she get all of the Oh, Ian looks cold. She stole all of Ian's clothes so that she could trust the snow.

David Patrick 18:47
And I love it. That's awesome.

Mike Walker 18:49
Yes.

David Patrick 18:50
And I've read this book a million times. I'm just now noticing something for the first time.

Mike Walker 18:54
What's that?

David Patrick 18:55
Okay, actually, hold that thought. Two things when you said and then another favorite spread and I turned to Page and as you said, Olivia and Ian worked all afternoon. I was looking at the same words. So once again, we're on the same page. It's crazy.

Mike Walker 19:08
That's crazy.

David Patrick 19:09
But if you look at the snow man who's completely dressed, both of them have their mouth is like, down, huh?

Mike Walker 19:18
Sort of a frown. Yeah.

David Patrick 19:20
But Olivia's has a curve up on each end, so she's smiling. Yeah, Ian doesn't. So he's not that the snow man's face and look are identical to Ian's. Yes. I didn't really notice that before.

Mike Walker 19:33
Look.

David Patrick 19:34
Hold up. I mean, do snowmen get cold?

Mike Walker 19:38
Well, they're obviously already cold because. Right.

David Patrick 19:42
Well, yeah.

Mike Walker 19:43
So it's it's a matter of life imitating art or like art imitating pigs in a book.

David Patrick 19:52
But I don't want to talk about any more art in this book because I don't want to spoil the ending.

Mike Walker 19:57
Yes, absolutely.

David Patrick 19:59
I mean, this is the kind of book that that, you know, like I said, my youngest, the youngest between our two girls is nine years old. She'll be ten next month. And yet I can read this. I've read this book so many times by myself. It's so good and so funny. And one thing I haven't done is read it with them recently because we don't read with them anymore. But I'll bet they would love this because it's still funny and still good and the nostalgia for them is so much fresher.

Mike Walker 20:26
Absolutely. It's funny you bring that up because during the pandemic, close to the beginning, I got a call from my mom and she was like, you know, you guys are so far away and I don't know when we're going to get to see each other. And I want the girls to remember me. And she said, Is it okay if ask them if we could read once a week? And I thought, Well, that's cool. Yeah. Like, and at this point they were, let's go back in time. So 13 and 11 ish. And they were super excited that, oh my gosh, we're going to get to like for an hour a week. We're going to read with grandma.

David Patrick 21:12
That's awesome. You did it via Zoom or something like that?

Mike Walker 21:14
No, just on the phone.

David Patrick 21:15
Oh, just even on the phone. Yes. The voice.

Mike Walker 21:18
It wasn't like the kids books that have all the pictures. They got into some different stuff and we can talk about it later because I don't remember what it was. I don't remember the title of it, but it's kind of fantasy sci fi ish stuff. And I just thought it was super cool that she wanted to read something with them.

David Patrick 21:42
Oh, wow.

Mike Walker 21:43
And I miss it. I don't know if they missed that, but I know I miss sitting down and reading Goodnight Moon a kid in my lap, which would be much harder now because they're grown.

David Patrick 21:58
So

harder and, I don't know, awkward.

I think based on what you just said, I definitely want to read some of these with the girls and I think it could be fun. I mean, experiments. I'll I'll check in with you next time and let you know how that goes, how it went.

Mike Walker 22:18
I think my younger one, Ruby, I think would totally be into it. Yeah. I'm not sure if Stella would be into it or not. Yeah, but maybe. But I think it would be fun to read these stories that we read to them as kids. Yeah. And go, Oh, do you remember this? Like, what's your take on a whole nother podcast series?

David Patrick 22:42
So like.

Mike Walker 22:45
We're in episode two and we're already branching out. Yes, we're editing spinoffs.

David Patrick 22:50
Yes, We're barely into September, and it's.

Mike Walker 22:52
Like The Jeffersons. Oh, I mean, Archie Bunker.

David Patrick 22:55
I mean Archie Bunker's Place. I mean, wait, what?

Mike Walker 22:58
I mean, All in the Family.

David Patrick 23:01
I love it. All right. So, yeah, we definitely recommend Olivia Helps with Christmas by Ian Falconer. Just brilliant and fun. Fun for all ages. Absolutely. But if you really have very, very young kids, I think starting around pre-K or kindergarten, they can start to get a kick out of it if you're reading it to them. And it's going to help them learn to read. And all that I think is perfect.

Mike Walker 23:23
And I think that that's the biggest thing. I think reading to them makes them want to read as well. Yeah, Ruby doesn't put her books down unless she's reading a book on her phone. So I kind of have a hard time arguing. Put your phone down. But I'm reading a book.

David Patrick 23:45
We finally got the girls Kindles Christmas this year, and I was against it for a while. But the cool thing is they still love books and one of them even said, Daddy, can we still go to the library once we have these? And it was like A Yes and B, yes.

I talked to some librarians about it and they said it's just it's technology, but it enhances reading.

Mike Walker 24:09
Absolutely.

David Patrick 24:10
And it helps them want to read more and find books and go, I can't find this book, but I read it this way, whatever. So it's all good.

Mike Walker 24:17
I do think that that's the best thing about being able to find books online. You can read them at any time, anywhere in the world. If you have access to the internet, you can find a book. Maybe it's not the exact book you want. I've read books that I had no desire to read, but I started and I'm like, Oh my God, this is way more interesting than I thought. I read a book about a train trip during World War Two, and it made me cry so totally another book that I was looking for, but like, Oh, I'm in this place and I have nothing to do, and what do I have on the Kindle?

David Patrick 24:58
You mentioned travel, one of the final selling points that Monica made. She said, Remember when we went to Argentina for Christmas the year before, like, yeah, she goes imagining if we didn't have to simply say, Girls, can you pick two books because you're traveling internationally like that? You can't read a lot of books with your Kindle. You can't.

Mike Walker 25:15
Okay, So maybe we haven't traveled to international yet, but every trip I have been on with my children, I pick up their backpack and I'm like, one, I can't pick this up. How many books do you have in here? Good golly, Miss Molly.

David Patrick 25:32
Good stuff. I love it.

Mike Walker 25:34
Yeah, I think we should probably wrap it up.

David Patrick 25:37
I think we should get while we're recording this and talking about books. It's actually nighttime in. The girls are asleep and I'm getting old. I'm tired.

Mike Walker 25:45
Yeah, mine are not asleep. And, well, maybe reading a book, but this has been really fun. I've enjoyed talking about an old book.

David Patrick 25:54
With you and.

Mike Walker 25:55
Old book that, you know, came out 15 years ago, maybe.

David Patrick 25:59
In the early part of the 21st century. Oh.

Mike Walker 26:03
Yes.

David Patrick 26:04
Hey, before we finish, I think I picked the first two books. Do you have one?

Mike Walker 26:08
I don't.

David Patrick 26:09
Okay.

Mike Walker 26:09
I've kind of gone back and forth between reading something like Goodnight Moon because that's a good younger kid book. But then I was also thinking, Oh, I want to go to something a little bit older because I get stuck in like, Oh, we're just reading books for under second grade.

David Patrick 26:31
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Walker 26:31
And one of the books I'd like to eventually get to is called My Side of the Mountain, but it's longer. But then.

David Patrick 26:39
Ooh.

Mike Walker 26:41
I've got it. There's a book called Mrs. MCATs in our house full of cats. Hmm. We should read that. It's very fun. And I think you'll get a kick out of it. And then the other one that at some point I think we should put on the list is Jamie Lee Curtis wrote a book, The Book of Big Words. think I've heard of that. My brother actually bought it for Stella and my kids vocabulary is so expanded just because of this book.

David Patrick 27:13
One thing that popped in my head always, and I want to put it down just in case a book with no pictures.

Mike Walker 27:19
Oh, it's another great one. There's another one that's similar to that to try and think of that.

David Patrick 27:25
And then when we do the book with the pictures, I'll tell you about the time that I met B.J. Novak, the author. Do a spot we must say good night.

Mike Walker 27:35
Well, it's been great having this this podcast date with you.

David Patrick 27:41
I agree completely. And I shall do it again.

Mike Walker 27:43
I hope you all enjoyed dads on books will be back.

David Patrick 27:47
Happy reading

Mike Walker 27:50
and books.