In our family we are celebrating Black History Month! The kids are still young so we keep the stories we tell them positive. Our 4 year old loves learning about Mary Seacole and Rosa Parks. We bought a bunch of books about black historical figures (and other diverse books) before Eddie was even born. We were so excited and passionate about giving our children a diverse library and exposing them to a range of diverse and inclusive stories about people from all over the world. That’s when we started to realise actually there isn’t a huge amount of diversity out there in children’s books… so the beginnings of Parakeet Books was born. Fast forward to Eddie’s third year and we thought, hey let’s write our own diverse books! Let’s write our own inclusive stories for ALL CHILDREN, not just our own! And that’s exactly what we’re doing now. In Buddy’s Pancakes we have a gorgeous story of love, families and food – the family have mixed heritage but that is not the focus of the story. And in the Alice and Judy adventures the two sisters are the heroes, saving the world from global warming.

We have two more beautiful and inclusive stories in the pipeline that I will tell you about in my next post. So watch this space!