Catherine: I wrote this book because I have the kind of kid -- my daughter Birdy who's seventeen now, for her whole life, she has really liked to do it her own self. She started saying that when she was one and a half and has said it basically ever since. She, at some point, was twelve or thirteen and I had asked her to do some basic task like sweep the kitchen. I think it was a holiday. She didn't know how to do it. She had never picked up a broom. That was my fault. It had never occurred to me to ask her. She didn't know how to do it and didn't want to be shown how to do it. Then you're in your own personal vacuum of you can't learn something if you don't let someone show you, so you need a book. I went to the library to get a book that I pictured as a photographic encyclopedia of housework. This is a book I thought would exist and would be a really great book for kids that would be a thousand pages long and every page would be an eight-step photograph of how to sweep the floor, how to clean the bathroom. That book did not exist, you'll be surprised to hear. Then I thought, there must be books that show kids how to do useful stuff. Weirdly, there's lots of books about fun useful stuff like all the Girl Scout-type books, but there really wasn't a book that was about teaching kids to do basic household chores. That's the book I set out to write. Then it kind of evolved because my wise publisher thought that still wasn't going to be a really fun book if it was just about chores. That's how it got to be so variable.
