"I grew up in Flint, Michigan, with my five brothers -- Jim, Tom, Gregg, Brian, and What's-His-Name. The youngest one. Oh yeah -- Jeff.
I'm the second oldest. And the nicest. And the smartest. And the best looking. And the most humble.
We didn't have any sisters. All boys. Even our dogs and cats and fish were boys. I'm not sure how that happened. That's just how it was.
My dad, Louis Scieszka, was an elementary-school principal. We didn't go to his school, which was probably good, because being sent to the principal would have been weird. But my dad used a lot of his principal skills to run a house with six boys. We had the home version of meetings and rules and schedules.
My mom, Shirley, was a nurse. This also came in handy, because she could tape us up when we ran through windows, fell out of trees, crashed our bikes, stuck a dart in Tom's leg, or broke Gregg's collarbone.
Now that I write for kids, a lot of readers ask me where I get my ideas. I think that's a great question. But I feel like I've never come up with a good answer. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I get a lot of my ideas from all of the strange things that happened to me growing up with five brothers. So here is the beginning of the answer to that mysterious and difficult question: 'Where do you get your ideas?'"
I read this book in one side-splitting sitting, and then read it aloud to my girls in one more side-splitting sitting. They then in turn read the whole thing aloud to my husband. These are stories from childhood by children's author Jon Scieszka (The Stinky Cheese Man, Battle Bunny, Squids Will be Squids, The Time Warp Trio, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and others). Mr. Scieszka shares delightful family stories about knucklehead brothers and the many crazy schemes they concocted. A perfect book to introduce the biography/memoir genre to kids: they will eat it up.
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