My mother lives a nine-hour flight away from her grandchildren. She has opinions about this, and she shares them, and fair enough.
Video calls help, but anyone who has held a phone up to a wriggling four-year-old knows the ceiling on that. The kids perform for ninety seconds, then drift off to live their lives, and my mother is left talking to a lampshade.
Then, this year, an accident of arithmetic changed everything. When we ordered the kids’ coloring book of our summer holiday, the second copy was free. On a whim, we posted it to her.
Same pages, two kitchens,
one very competitive grandmother.
{Tweet that.}
Now there are two identical books in two kitchens on two sides of an ocean, and on Sunday afternoons they open to the same page. My mother has bought herself a tin of proper pencils. She takes it extremely seriously. Last week she informed my oldest that her rendering of the harbour was “more accurate,” and the two of them argued about the color of a boat for ten solid minutes, and I would bottle that argument and keep it forever if I could.
Here is the part I didn’t expect. My mother wasn’t on that holiday. But to color the pages she has to ask about them, and so, page by page, the kids have been handing her the whole trip. The paddleboard incident. The mango man. The seagull. She knows the stories now the way you know stories you were there for.
The wriggling four-year-old, the one who used to abandon the phone on the couch, will now sit through an entire call, because her hands have a job and her grandmother is right there on the page with her.
Distance is stubborn. Flights are expensive and time zones are rude. But it turns out a shared page shrinks the ocean better than anything else we’ve tried. Two sets of hands, coloring the same afternoon, a world apart and at the same table.
Right now Outline Origins is running buy one, get the second free, which is precisely how the Nana Edition came to exist. We ship worldwide. If someone far away loves your kids, send them the second copy and pick a page to start on together.
