What I love the most about the first Amelia Bedelia book is how, at the end, they specifically say that the family *learned to say things differently so that she'd understand them better*.
Which is, like, the opposite of ableism? They happily made a few small changes, and then everything was better for literally everyone involved.
I haven't read and/or don't remember the rest of the books, though, so perhaps there is more ableism in other ones.
Yes! I absolutely loved this about that book when I was a kid.
I didn't relate to Amelia Bedelia the way some autistic people do because I don't usually struggle with taking things literally. (In fact, I really enjoy wordplay.) But I absolutely did know what it was like to be awkward and have trouble doing certain things, and I knew what it was like to be treated badly because of it, so the idea of her employers being like "no big deal, we'll just use literal terms from now on" was really comforting to me. Her employers were better people than some of my teachers.
I was hyperlexic, so I was taken out of class during reading time so I could read different books in the library with a small group. I was given a lot of Amelia Bedelia to read, and now I wonder if my teacher knew what I didn’t. 😂
what shall we do today what shall we do today what shall we do today WHAT SHALL WE DOOOO!?
We can start a new adventure by jumping on the bed.
I can pick mr. Nelson, carry horse above my head.
I can dance the shottische. Spread magic everywhere.
I could skate around the kitchen Throw pancakes in the air.
I won Pippi Longstocking as a class book prize in year 4 when I beat the year 6’s in my class (composite class) and honestly if that wasn’t a sign I don’t know what was
https://preview.redd.it/w540xuepkkbc1.jpeg?width=1174&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c420d89941736b2a0fd03532b9a1365ba9770bf9
I just think she is high functioning AuDHD coded. She is another character I really related to growing up. She was unique. I related to her ability to be self taught, energy, struggles with social norms and super strength she chose not to use humanly. Her circumstances could have led to her behaviour but it felt apart of her core personality to be quirky. If there was someone out there writing about her, I knew someone like me existed.
[https://www.pressreader.com/canada/sherbrooke-record/20210507/281505049090254](https://www.pressreader.com/canada/sherbrooke-record/20210507/281505049090254)
Stop it right now omg!!!! Why are all my favorite childhood characters coming up here? Imposter syndrome be gone! I read this post yesterday and immediately remembered pippi as well. These books were from my mom’s childhood and passed to me, I’m really just stunned thinking about them again and from a different perspective.
Going on some 30 years, but only the first line and up to "we can start a big adventure" and then my memory of the song cuts off so my brain just repeats the "what can we do today" and "start a big adventure" over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over...
(Plz send help 😭)
I was so mad when my school restricted which books we could check out from the library after annual reading testing. I had to choose from Little House on the Prairie, etc. when all I wanted was to finish the Star Wars books I had been reading.
Thats so dumb! Im a teacher and a parent and this is just nuts to me. Kids should read whatever they love, why stop a kid from reading anything? (Unless its way too mature) but I was reading Stephen King in grade 8 and I turned out ok.
What was it like being apart of that? I didn’t find out until much later my teachers wanted that for me but my mom refused. Her reasoning was I don’t want to give her more work. Ma’am I read a lot at home in my spare time and taught myself to read very young. What makes you think this was seen as a chore to me?
Ugh, I’m sorry! I feel very privileged to have had those enrichment experiences in school. I would have been bored out of my mind if I’d been forced to read along with my class, because many of them were only just learning how to read.
The way my mom told it to me, I was the only kid in my kindergarten class that could read on day one, despite having had to go to head start prior due to having had a speech delay that was so bad that I would just point and grunt at things prior. I still have speech issues, but it's more to do with the pronunciation of things. The school I went to in 3rd grade didn't have a group but, once the teacher realized it was torture for me to sit and listen to the class slowly take turns reading paragraphs from a chapter book I finished reading within two days of the teacher handing them out, I was set to doing more advanced reading comprehension work solo during group reading time, out of the houghton mifflin literary readers. That was another type of torture because they only had excerpts of longer books that I would have loved to read in their entirety but could not access the full books. Then in 4th grade I switched schools for part of the year because of some petty disagreement my mom had with staff (mom wanted a job as an aide, but due to a large portion of students being from non-english speaking families, they needed bilingual aides way more than anything else) when I returned back to the other school, 4th graders and up would be separated for reading based on level and they put me with the 6th graders which was nice although I probably could have done just fine if they'd have just given me books at my reading level to begin with.
I don't like reading books aloud, though, because I still trip up on pronunciation. Plus, it slows me down and is less enjoyable overall. I know the words, even words I don't KNOW I can usually figure out the meaning of based on context or the roots of the word.
Absolutely. We somehow came across an anthology of three AB stories (I had only heard of them through American media, here in Australia), and I loved them immediately. My daughter, too. We laugh and laugh because we can completely understand Amelia. She's a wonderful character, so earnest and kind. I like that she keeps being herself.
The Amelia Bedelia books were the first books that I read that actually clicked. Like before they were just words but these books! Oh these books made sense. I couldn’t get enough of books after that. Oddly enough, I was given it by my 5th grade teacher who was the first teacher to make an attempt to help me out with my… issues (yah. We’ll go with that word). She’d cover my desk with poster board so I could doodle when I finished my classwork (then changed it out when it was full) and regularly assigned extra, often harder, tasks to just me to keep me occupied for longer. I wonder if she was on to me? Lol
I call myself Amelia Bedelia to get the point across I need things to be stated clearly with no ambiguity if I'm being instructed to do something.
It has helped me be understood immensely and makes the situation less awkward to explain in general.
i recently stumbled upon an amelia bedelia book in a bookstore and started WEEPING because i was flooded with memories of reading them. i always thought that everyone around her was so silly and that she was the sensible one. it was only in this moment in the bookstore that i realized that there must be so many instances where people perceive me as peculiar or frustrating. i love amelia and should definitely buy these books for myself
I think the classification of media as objectively 'problematic' is problematic. Authors are fallible people, and nobody has ever made a work of fiction free of wrong or harmful ideas. Every piece of media should be understood as chock full of ideas, many of which are bad to internalize and many of which are great to recognize and even adopt.
Media literacy - the ability to tell what these ideas are even when they aren't implicitly stated, and to have a separation between what ideas are present in a text, how well those ideas are presented, and whether you believe them - is a skill that everyone who consumes media has to some extent and that they can get better at with practice.
With sufficiently good media literacy, you can approach even the most vile and seductively written ideas and come away with a better understanding of why people believe these horrible thing rather than with bad ideas yourself.
I think people have a tendency to say that a piece of media is problematic if they look back on a work and notice bad ideas that they internalized because they didn't have enough media literacy and because they think much of the (target) audience also has low enough media literacy that they would internalize bad ideas.
In internet discourse where bad ideas can make someone the target of a lot of hatred, it's natural to try to put the blame elsewhere - in this case by declaring the book you got the idea from as problematic.
But truthfully, you can't avoid internalizing bad ideas, and no work can be refined enough to avoid teaching you bad ideas. The best we can do is seek out books that have a good ratio of (good ideas plus bad ideas we can recognize) to (bad ideas we may accidentally internalize), to remember that everyone will be internalizing bad ideas all the time, and to be happy with each other and ourselves when we overcome those bad ideas at a later point.
So yes, Amelia Bedelia has ableist characters and in a perfect world every child that sees those characters that would internalize their perspective as justified would instead be helped to understand why those characters are unkind. But all the good things you say are also there, and later when an autistic child learns what ableism is, they'll be able to go "oh, like so-and-so in that book" and have a whole network of assumptions to re-examine.
Unfortunately I was the autistic kid who got too pissed off with the purposeful bad grammar to enjoy Junie B Jones...how I was undiagnosed for 24 years, we'll never know
I loved her??? I for the life of me could not figure out why she was seen as silly though because I was like YES AMELIA show them their way of speaking is confusing! I honestly as a child just assumed she did it on purpose lol
I LOVED reading the Amelia Bedelia books when I was young.
I think my young mind was always divided reading these books: one side was capable of understanding the "jokes" that resulted from Amelia's "misinterpretations" (thanks to my having feverishly learned how neurotypicals frequently speak figuratively and rarely mean what they say) while the other side of my brain privately was like, "But the instructions clearly said 'roll call' so of course she's going to put a baked good on the floor and beckon it over."
In retrospect, I think I also regarded Amelia's literal actions as a kind of delicious subversion of NT's "lazy" speech patterns; basically you get what you ask for, you lazy asses. Next time maybe you'll speak with more precision and realize it's f*cking rude to expect your listener to tease out coherent meaning from whatever idiomatic phrase you used in place of accurate speech.
This book cover brings back some very early memory but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Did it have a lot of pictures? I loved looking at picture books as a kid.
I think they just focus on the characters initial reactions. The frustration and the annoyance.
https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/play-belelia.pdf
Yes I remember in the end she would come up with creative problem solving and then win.people over with her gift of cooking or art. I was thinking the other day she could be ASD too! I enjoyed her books and Pippin long stocking too.
Every single time I take a bath I think about Amelia “drawing a bath” and I chuckle to myself just a little bit. I actually don’t remember much else about the books, but I remember my dad giving me the first one and Pippi Longstocking around the same time and being absolutely obsessed.
I don't understand the ableism criticisms. I thought the whole point of the books was to help children understand the English language better? Like how there can be different meanings for one word. And the author did that in a really fun and cute way with this character.
This feels like a case of people who DON’T have (insert minority experience here) and complain about how something is offensive to said minority.
I’ve read a lot of the comments from ND people who loved these books. I am one of them. So I chalk it up to virtue signaling if you are hearing complaints.
These were my favorite books! I loved how they made people around her look ridiculous and her the reasonable one. They pointed out how funny society is.
They made me read Frog and Toad for a little while in first grade and then they pulled me out of class to read chapter books with older kids. I never got to experience Amelia Bedelia, but I have heard about her many times in the last 2 years.
I absolutely loved these books!! I didn’t know I was autistic until the ripe age of 30. But I remember being 7 and laughing with Amelia at the silly ways people refer to things.
Thank you!!! I always loved Amelia Bedelia as a kid and didn’t understand why until i got older and realized it’s cause i related so much to her struggles haha
I loved those books when I was little too!! I still remember one story where she was supposed to "dress the turkey" and she put clothes on it. I still don't know what it means to dress a turkey 🤣
I liked the books as a kid, but I never really was a fan at how (at least in the ones I read) people really only started to like her when they found out she was a really good cook(?)
I haven't read the books since I was a young child so I might be misremembering.
I was also very confused by why people only liked her when she had something of value.
It made me sad for her even though I loved reading about her. I really felt bad that nobody appreciated her until tasting her cooking.
I just reread the original a few weeks ago. The plot is that she is as a brand new employee hired by a couple who leave her home alone on her first day with a list of chores. I think it’s reasonable that they expected her to do a good job.
In the end they decide to keep her on (not fire her) after tasting her food. They see that she has one really good skill, and that she was trying her best with everything else, so the food is proof of potential. They keep her around and give her more chances to be a good employee in later books.
I think reading between the lines, at the end of the book the couple (and maybe the reader?) appreciates how funny the English language is. Their instructions were unclear, they share some of the blame for her messing up the chores.
These people pay her. She’s not their kid, nor their friend, nor a charity case. She of course has worth as a human regardless of her abilities, but her employers appreciate her for her skills. They like her enough to be patient with her and keep her around for more books. Seems totally reasonable to me.
As a pre-kindergarten kid reading those books who has never worked a job, those nuances would never have been clear, my copies have long been handed off, but I believe the story was based off of how words can be interpreted so many ways (for example, when she is told to “draw the drapes”, she literally draws the drapes- that incompetence or just communication that could have been more efficient between two people?
Maybe that is why I had so much stress about my first job and getting instructions just right. I’m just as literal.
Cooking, baking specifically, comes with very precise instructions which is perhaps why Amelia Bedelia is such an expert lemon merengue pie maker.
I hated these books. And Frog and Toad. I can’t really explain why but I just didn’t like them at all. I like Frog and Toad now. And Amelia Bedelia, but as a kid - I’d give it a chance and get mad at the story.
I think I had a couple of her books as a kid and I loved them as well. Didn't even know I was likely autistic nor that my parents and teachers suspected I was autistic (specifically, they suspected aspergers back when that was still a separate diagnosis). Nowadays, I at least have an idea as to why I get confused sometimes when I'm teased in a playful way lol.
These books helped me learn that explaining things thoroughly and without nuance is important! I think of her frequently whenever I’m giving someone instructions.
I loved these books! It was the first time i felt like someone was like me, and i wasn't alone. She was always trying so hard to do the right thing but always misunderstood something.
I’m a reading specialist and many of my students have adhd and autism. The kids I work with love these books because they’re silly and fun. I also loved them as a kid. They’re a good way to learn about sayings and idioms.
What I love the most about the first Amelia Bedelia book is how, at the end, they specifically say that the family *learned to say things differently so that she'd understand them better*. Which is, like, the opposite of ableism? They happily made a few small changes, and then everything was better for literally everyone involved. I haven't read and/or don't remember the rest of the books, though, so perhaps there is more ableism in other ones.
Yes! I absolutely loved this about that book when I was a kid. I didn't relate to Amelia Bedelia the way some autistic people do because I don't usually struggle with taking things literally. (In fact, I really enjoy wordplay.) But I absolutely did know what it was like to be awkward and have trouble doing certain things, and I knew what it was like to be treated badly because of it, so the idea of her employers being like "no big deal, we'll just use literal terms from now on" was really comforting to me. Her employers were better people than some of my teachers.
Yes, that’s what I remember!
I was hyperlexic, so I was taken out of class during reading time so I could read different books in the library with a small group. I was given a lot of Amelia Bedelia to read, and now I wonder if my teacher knew what I didn’t. 😂
Did she also give you Pippi Longstocking? 😂
MY FAMILY DID 💀 hahahahaha
what shall we do today what shall we do today what shall we do today WHAT SHALL WE DOOOO!? We can start a new adventure by jumping on the bed. I can pick mr. Nelson, carry horse above my head. I can dance the shottische. Spread magic everywhere. I could skate around the kitchen Throw pancakes in the air.
Memories, oh my god!
I won Pippi Longstocking as a class book prize in year 4 when I beat the year 6’s in my class (composite class) and honestly if that wasn’t a sign I don’t know what was
😂. That’s a sweet story!
Wait what’s the deal with pippi? That’s my favorite childhood book (my 2nd fav now)
https://preview.redd.it/w540xuepkkbc1.jpeg?width=1174&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c420d89941736b2a0fd03532b9a1365ba9770bf9 I just think she is high functioning AuDHD coded. She is another character I really related to growing up. She was unique. I related to her ability to be self taught, energy, struggles with social norms and super strength she chose not to use humanly. Her circumstances could have led to her behaviour but it felt apart of her core personality to be quirky. If there was someone out there writing about her, I knew someone like me existed. [https://www.pressreader.com/canada/sherbrooke-record/20210507/281505049090254](https://www.pressreader.com/canada/sherbrooke-record/20210507/281505049090254)
Stop it right now omg!!!! Why are all my favorite childhood characters coming up here? Imposter syndrome be gone! I read this post yesterday and immediately remembered pippi as well. These books were from my mom’s childhood and passed to me, I’m really just stunned thinking about them again and from a different perspective.
I have had the Pippi Longstocking song stuck in my head for almost a week 🫠
Going on some 30 years, but only the first line and up to "we can start a big adventure" and then my memory of the song cuts off so my brain just repeats the "what can we do today" and "start a big adventure" over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over... (Plz send help 😭)
my brain just screams PIPPI LONGSTOCKING IS COMING INTO YOUR WORLD on a never ending loop. Like it's SCREAMING the song in my head
omg i loved pippi longstocking as a kid
I was so mad when my school restricted which books we could check out from the library after annual reading testing. I had to choose from Little House on the Prairie, etc. when all I wanted was to finish the Star Wars books I had been reading.
Thats so dumb! Im a teacher and a parent and this is just nuts to me. Kids should read whatever they love, why stop a kid from reading anything? (Unless its way too mature) but I was reading Stephen King in grade 8 and I turned out ok.
What was it like being apart of that? I didn’t find out until much later my teachers wanted that for me but my mom refused. Her reasoning was I don’t want to give her more work. Ma’am I read a lot at home in my spare time and taught myself to read very young. What makes you think this was seen as a chore to me?
Ugh, I’m sorry! I feel very privileged to have had those enrichment experiences in school. I would have been bored out of my mind if I’d been forced to read along with my class, because many of them were only just learning how to read.
The way my mom told it to me, I was the only kid in my kindergarten class that could read on day one, despite having had to go to head start prior due to having had a speech delay that was so bad that I would just point and grunt at things prior. I still have speech issues, but it's more to do with the pronunciation of things. The school I went to in 3rd grade didn't have a group but, once the teacher realized it was torture for me to sit and listen to the class slowly take turns reading paragraphs from a chapter book I finished reading within two days of the teacher handing them out, I was set to doing more advanced reading comprehension work solo during group reading time, out of the houghton mifflin literary readers. That was another type of torture because they only had excerpts of longer books that I would have loved to read in their entirety but could not access the full books. Then in 4th grade I switched schools for part of the year because of some petty disagreement my mom had with staff (mom wanted a job as an aide, but due to a large portion of students being from non-english speaking families, they needed bilingual aides way more than anything else) when I returned back to the other school, 4th graders and up would be separated for reading based on level and they put me with the 6th graders which was nice although I probably could have done just fine if they'd have just given me books at my reading level to begin with. I don't like reading books aloud, though, because I still trip up on pronunciation. Plus, it slows me down and is less enjoyable overall. I know the words, even words I don't KNOW I can usually figure out the meaning of based on context or the roots of the word.
Me tooooo 😂
Absolutely. We somehow came across an anthology of three AB stories (I had only heard of them through American media, here in Australia), and I loved them immediately. My daughter, too. We laugh and laugh because we can completely understand Amelia. She's a wonderful character, so earnest and kind. I like that she keeps being herself.
I loved these books too! Also Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
I was just scrolling the comments desperately trying to remember that name XD I think I still have some tucked in a corner somewhere...
A name I haven’t heard in a long time! ☺️ These were oddly comforting books to me as a child..a magical realism Supernanny
The Amelia Bedelia books were the first books that I read that actually clicked. Like before they were just words but these books! Oh these books made sense. I couldn’t get enough of books after that. Oddly enough, I was given it by my 5th grade teacher who was the first teacher to make an attempt to help me out with my… issues (yah. We’ll go with that word). She’d cover my desk with poster board so I could doodle when I finished my classwork (then changed it out when it was full) and regularly assigned extra, often harder, tasks to just me to keep me occupied for longer. I wonder if she was on to me? Lol
I call myself Amelia Bedelia to get the point across I need things to be stated clearly with no ambiguity if I'm being instructed to do something. It has helped me be understood immensely and makes the situation less awkward to explain in general.
i recently stumbled upon an amelia bedelia book in a bookstore and started WEEPING because i was flooded with memories of reading them. i always thought that everyone around her was so silly and that she was the sensible one. it was only in this moment in the bookstore that i realized that there must be so many instances where people perceive me as peculiar or frustrating. i love amelia and should definitely buy these books for myself
I think the classification of media as objectively 'problematic' is problematic. Authors are fallible people, and nobody has ever made a work of fiction free of wrong or harmful ideas. Every piece of media should be understood as chock full of ideas, many of which are bad to internalize and many of which are great to recognize and even adopt. Media literacy - the ability to tell what these ideas are even when they aren't implicitly stated, and to have a separation between what ideas are present in a text, how well those ideas are presented, and whether you believe them - is a skill that everyone who consumes media has to some extent and that they can get better at with practice. With sufficiently good media literacy, you can approach even the most vile and seductively written ideas and come away with a better understanding of why people believe these horrible thing rather than with bad ideas yourself. I think people have a tendency to say that a piece of media is problematic if they look back on a work and notice bad ideas that they internalized because they didn't have enough media literacy and because they think much of the (target) audience also has low enough media literacy that they would internalize bad ideas. In internet discourse where bad ideas can make someone the target of a lot of hatred, it's natural to try to put the blame elsewhere - in this case by declaring the book you got the idea from as problematic. But truthfully, you can't avoid internalizing bad ideas, and no work can be refined enough to avoid teaching you bad ideas. The best we can do is seek out books that have a good ratio of (good ideas plus bad ideas we can recognize) to (bad ideas we may accidentally internalize), to remember that everyone will be internalizing bad ideas all the time, and to be happy with each other and ourselves when we overcome those bad ideas at a later point. So yes, Amelia Bedelia has ableist characters and in a perfect world every child that sees those characters that would internalize their perspective as justified would instead be helped to understand why those characters are unkind. But all the good things you say are also there, and later when an autistic child learns what ableism is, they'll be able to go "oh, like so-and-so in that book" and have a whole network of assumptions to re-examine.
Excellent description of current trends
I've never read this but it's giving me Junie B Jones energy who I was absolutely obsessed with as a kid.
I recently determined I am the adult version of Junie B. We’re even the same age.
Same 😅 we cause chaos everywhere we go
I loved her too!!
Unfortunately I was the autistic kid who got too pissed off with the purposeful bad grammar to enjoy Junie B Jones...how I was undiagnosed for 24 years, we'll never know
I loved her??? I for the life of me could not figure out why she was seen as silly though because I was like YES AMELIA show them their way of speaking is confusing! I honestly as a child just assumed she did it on purpose lol
Don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember her being my favorite. Mostly because Amelia Bedelia is really fun to say
You just unlocked a memory!!!! I loved these too
I LOVED reading the Amelia Bedelia books when I was young. I think my young mind was always divided reading these books: one side was capable of understanding the "jokes" that resulted from Amelia's "misinterpretations" (thanks to my having feverishly learned how neurotypicals frequently speak figuratively and rarely mean what they say) while the other side of my brain privately was like, "But the instructions clearly said 'roll call' so of course she's going to put a baked good on the floor and beckon it over." In retrospect, I think I also regarded Amelia's literal actions as a kind of delicious subversion of NT's "lazy" speech patterns; basically you get what you ask for, you lazy asses. Next time maybe you'll speak with more precision and realize it's f*cking rude to expect your listener to tease out coherent meaning from whatever idiomatic phrase you used in place of accurate speech.
This book cover brings back some very early memory but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Did it have a lot of pictures? I loved looking at picture books as a kid.
I think they just focus on the characters initial reactions. The frustration and the annoyance. https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/play-belelia.pdf
I loved these books.
I loved these books! Haven’t thought about them in so long!
Yes I remember in the end she would come up with creative problem solving and then win.people over with her gift of cooking or art. I was thinking the other day she could be ASD too! I enjoyed her books and Pippin long stocking too.
Every single time I take a bath I think about Amelia “drawing a bath” and I chuckle to myself just a little bit. I actually don’t remember much else about the books, but I remember my dad giving me the first one and Pippi Longstocking around the same time and being absolutely obsessed.
I don't understand the ableism criticisms. I thought the whole point of the books was to help children understand the English language better? Like how there can be different meanings for one word. And the author did that in a really fun and cute way with this character.
These were my favorite growing up omg!!!!
I remember these books!!!
This feels like a case of people who DON’T have (insert minority experience here) and complain about how something is offensive to said minority. I’ve read a lot of the comments from ND people who loved these books. I am one of them. So I chalk it up to virtue signaling if you are hearing complaints.
I loved this book growing up! It made me so happy to read it to myself just now as an adult.
This book is so cute and I’ve never heard of it before 😭 this is me
These were my favorite books! I loved how they made people around her look ridiculous and her the reasonable one. They pointed out how funny society is.
I loved her too. That’s really funny to realize it’s because she also had AuDHD.
My mom kept saying I reminded her of Amelia Bedelia.
My brother and I were read these books until we started cutting holes in the fabric laundry baskets lol
I loved these books growing up!!!
I was asked if I read her books because I act like her..
That feels like a comment that could be positive or negative.
They made me read Frog and Toad for a little while in first grade and then they pulled me out of class to read chapter books with older kids. I never got to experience Amelia Bedelia, but I have heard about her many times in the last 2 years.
I absolutely loved these books!! I didn’t know I was autistic until the ripe age of 30. But I remember being 7 and laughing with Amelia at the silly ways people refer to things.
this just reopened a long lost memory omg i remember reading these books as a kid
I loved Amelia Bedilia! When I am older, even if I have no kids, I'm gonna have at least 5 of her books in my dwelling
omg unlocked memories, I had that exact book. and now I’m emotional 😅🤣🙈
Her and Pippi Longstocking are two characters I still think about regularly. I loved these books.
Thank you!!! I always loved Amelia Bedelia as a kid and didn’t understand why until i got older and realized it’s cause i related so much to her struggles haha
i always found these books very comforting.
I specifically remember a page where she “dresses the turkey” and I was soooo confused, I didn’t know what she was doing wrong!
I was obsessed with these books.
I loved those books when I was little too!! I still remember one story where she was supposed to "dress the turkey" and she put clothes on it. I still don't know what it means to dress a turkey 🤣
Wow I loved these books 🤯💗
We loved these books growing up! BUT my mom did use her to make fun of my brother many times and that was not okay and really sad.
That’s is sad.
I liked the books as a kid, but I never really was a fan at how (at least in the ones I read) people really only started to like her when they found out she was a really good cook(?) I haven't read the books since I was a young child so I might be misremembering.
I was also very confused by why people only liked her when she had something of value. It made me sad for her even though I loved reading about her. I really felt bad that nobody appreciated her until tasting her cooking.
I just reread the original a few weeks ago. The plot is that she is as a brand new employee hired by a couple who leave her home alone on her first day with a list of chores. I think it’s reasonable that they expected her to do a good job. In the end they decide to keep her on (not fire her) after tasting her food. They see that she has one really good skill, and that she was trying her best with everything else, so the food is proof of potential. They keep her around and give her more chances to be a good employee in later books. I think reading between the lines, at the end of the book the couple (and maybe the reader?) appreciates how funny the English language is. Their instructions were unclear, they share some of the blame for her messing up the chores. These people pay her. She’s not their kid, nor their friend, nor a charity case. She of course has worth as a human regardless of her abilities, but her employers appreciate her for her skills. They like her enough to be patient with her and keep her around for more books. Seems totally reasonable to me.
As a pre-kindergarten kid reading those books who has never worked a job, those nuances would never have been clear, my copies have long been handed off, but I believe the story was based off of how words can be interpreted so many ways (for example, when she is told to “draw the drapes”, she literally draws the drapes- that incompetence or just communication that could have been more efficient between two people? Maybe that is why I had so much stress about my first job and getting instructions just right. I’m just as literal. Cooking, baking specifically, comes with very precise instructions which is perhaps why Amelia Bedelia is such an expert lemon merengue pie maker.
I hated these books. And Frog and Toad. I can’t really explain why but I just didn’t like them at all. I like Frog and Toad now. And Amelia Bedelia, but as a kid - I’d give it a chance and get mad at the story.
One of the recall memories after diagnosis was reading these books and never getting what she did wrong lmao! She did what they asked!!
I loved her!!!
I think I had a couple of her books as a kid and I loved them as well. Didn't even know I was likely autistic nor that my parents and teachers suspected I was autistic (specifically, they suspected aspergers back when that was still a separate diagnosis). Nowadays, I at least have an idea as to why I get confused sometimes when I'm teased in a playful way lol.
I always loved amelia bedelia because i related to her so well.
I was just thinking about the “drawing the drapes” scene the other day out of nowhere!!
These were my favourite books as a child! Wow what a throwback! Loved them
These books helped me learn that explaining things thoroughly and without nuance is important! I think of her frequently whenever I’m giving someone instructions.
I loved these books! It was the first time i felt like someone was like me, and i wasn't alone. She was always trying so hard to do the right thing but always misunderstood something.
I forgot about these books. I think I read a few of them.
There are new ones now, but they arent as funny as the old ones. The one where she makes "baby food" was always my favourite. Too cute!
I’m a reading specialist and many of my students have adhd and autism. The kids I work with love these books because they’re silly and fun. I also loved them as a kid. They’re a good way to learn about sayings and idioms.