RAR #288: Why Board Books Are Important Tools (and Toys!) with Tabitha Paige

Tabitha Paige (0:00)

I love to create books and teach parents how to use that as a tool and as a toy, and a way to grow the interaction between you and the child. This is a bonding experience, and hopefully a bonding experience that will last till they graduate. You know, we want to love books together.

Sarah MacKenzie (0:34)

Hello, hello, welcome to the Read-Aloud Revival. This is the show that helps you make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books. I'm your host, Sarah Mackenzie. I'm the author of Teaching from Rest, the Read-Aloud Family, and a growing collection of picture books, and today we're going to dive into a topic we haven't really talked about much here at all. In all 12 years, the Read-Aloud Revival has been on air. I don't know that we've ever had an episode specifically on board books.

And board books are a unique medium to help our children meet books and stories and give them their first encounters with books and stories. So today on the show, I have Tabitha Paige. She is a best-selling author and illustrator.

She's an artist. She's a speech-language pathologist. She's a mother. And she makes beautiful illustrated board books. I have a whole bunch of them just stacked up here on my desk. You are going to love these. If you're listening to the episode, you should head over to YouTube and check this video out so you can see some of these books. Their illustrations are just absolutely stunning. I think you're going to love them. And we'll also put links in the show notes, of course, to those. But if you haven't encountered Tabitha Paige yet and her work, I'm so glad to introduce you to her today. Tabitha, welcome to the Read-Aloud Revival.

Tabitha Paige (1:51)

Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. I'm fangirling a little bit. You're a big part of my life, whether you know it or not. So this is a very special moment for me.

Sarah MacKenzie (2:03)

Well, your books are absolutely gorgeous. My oldest daughter and I opened a box full of them together and we're like owing and owing over just how beautiful they are. I love that it's... We say sometimes here at Read-Aloud Revival that a picture book is like putting an art gallery in a child's lap.

And your board books feel like little art galleries for the youngest reader. So before we dive into it, like what makes a good board book or what we're doing with board books, I would love it if you could just share a little bit of your background and what led you to the work you do now.

Tabitha Paige (2:38)

Oh, goodness. OK. Well, my career started actually when I was 15 years old. I was painting murals in downtown Houston. I had a small business, and I was a professional artist from a very young age. But I focused primarily on portrait work, realistic artwork, fine art.

And nowhere on my to-do list in this life was illustration. You know, I went to school to be a common artist, and quickly was very, very terrified of becoming a starving artist. And so I decided to get my backup degree, which would be speech therapy, because everybody said, you'll never have a problem getting a job. I loved kids. I had always worked with children with special needs. Seems like the perfect fit. It felt like a job where I could practice some creativity, even if it wasn't painting. And so got my degree, got my master's, went into the field, started working, thinking, well, I'll just continue to paint on the side. But as a full time speech therapist, I had no time to paint. And so I spent about five, six years practicing speech therapy, and I eventually decided, maybe I'll just start this little side business and do it on the side. And I started painting. I had a little Etsy shop. I was doing very small scale things because I was working full time. And pretty soon, I began to grow and grow my business, and my clients got less and less, and my artwork got more and more. And then we began to wholesale and license, and the business just took over. Never went back into the field. However, I loved speech therapy, and I felt like it was truly a gift that God had given me. I loved the creativity that came with especially early childhood language and development. And a couple years into my art career, a publisher reached out to me and said, hey, would you write me a children's book? And I said, no, I don't write children's books, nor do I illustrate. And he said, I think you should do it. I've seen your art, you know, with your speech therapy background, I think it could be really great.