So the Chicken Butt books came about because when my kids were little my older daughter in particular was in a preschool and there was a rule when you were eating you had to be sitting down. So one day I came to pick her up and she was having a snack and she was sitting, and then I noticed that all the kids in the room were going like this with their chairs and were sort of scooching their chairs from side to side trying to get a reaction and trying to see you know, I’m sitting, I’m not breaking the rule but what if I’m sitting and I’m moving my chair?
Like, where’s the line? That experience, I made a little note to myself and I start thinking about it and I started thinking there’s a story here about how a kid’s job is to figure out what the rule and then to try to figure out their way around it. And then I started to think about the silliness of the whole of making jokes with someone, just the whole, “You know what? Chicken butt.” Which for me is an old silly thing that you say that makes no sense but you can riff it out for a while.
And I started playing with it and thinking about what happens if you, if a kid tries to continue a joke past the point of a parent’s patience. Which is something I hadn’t really seen in a book before. And the other thing I wanted to create was a situation where there was satisfaction for the child. So I knew at the on-set of that book that the kid was going to win and so, because think about it in so many situations kids don’t win.
Ultimately they have to go to bed, or ultimately they have to leave the playground. It’s pretty satisfying to have a book where at the end of the book you win, you pulled one over, you got the last laugh so I wanted to give that to the kids that were reading it, give them that satisfaction.