Written by Meg McKinlay
Illustrated by Karen Blair

Walker Books Australia, October 2024
 Ages 0-5

When the sun’s light is fading and night’s on the rise,
it’s time to start yawning your sleepy goodbyes.
Time for snuggling and snoozing and slumbering now.
Time for making your bedtime, and I’ll show you how.

How do you make a perfect bedtime? An award-winning author and acclaimed illustrator craft a soothing picture book sure to inspire sweet dreams every night.

Inside a wonderfully warm home, a cuddly parental bear guides a young child through their bonding bedtime routine. A sloshy bath, soft pyjamas, a song for singing, a huggily hug before a story, then it’s bedtime at last. Cozy, appealing illustrations by Karen Blair accompany Meg McKinlay’s melodic, rhyming text in a picture book that little ones and their caretakers will want to incorporate into their own nightly rituals.

What Readers Are Saying:

 “A classic-in-the-making bear hug of a bedtime book … full of universal appeal”

Behind the Story

Years and years ago – back in 2008, to be exactly exact – when publishers were rejecting How to Make a Bird, one of them said maybe I could do something ‘more child-friendly’, like “How to Make a Birthday Party” or “How to Make a Bedtime”?

I said yeah, nah. Because How to Make a Bird was a perfect thing and they were missing the point. And even if no one wanted to publish it, and still believed in it and didn’t want to turn it into something different.

Years and years later – in 2018 to be exactly exact – I said yeah, nah, but maybe also yeah? Because why not have both? And because, while I hadn’t wanted to do “Publishing’s Idea of a More Child Friendly Thing” instead of my already-perfect thing, once said perfect thing had been contracted, it felt completely okay to do something else as well.

And as it happened, my brain being the unstoppable runaway train it is, I had a pile of noodling notes that had spilled out of me back in the ‘yeah nah’ days. I went back to those scribblings to see if there was anything worth anything and began noodling with a little more purpose – one day in prose, the next in rhyme (actually, who do I think I’m kidding – it was one minute in prose, the next minute in rhyme, because flipping and flopping and rarely achieving an actual sense of forward movement appears to be my process) – and eventually a shape began to emerge.

It was a rhyming text. Of course it was, because what better way to draw a young reader through the lovely rituals of bedtime, to lull them with a lullaby, using the anticipation of an end-rhyme to mirror the anticipation of the next stage in the familiar, cozy, reassuring process that is the nightly winding down and stepping towards sleep?

Karen Blair was the only possible illustrator for this book. I knew this from the beginning even though, as ever, I had no sense of what the visual story might look like. There is such an incredible warmth to the way she draws babies and children, to her depictions of the cozy interiority of family life. I knew that whatever she did would be warm and fuzzy and deliciously enfolding.

I did not know that it would involve a bear. But Karen being Karen, from the moment I saw early sketches of that beautiful stripey-pyjamaed Papa, I was utterly smitten.

It is such a delight to release this gorgeous book into the world. I hope it finds its place in the hearts and bedtime rituals of many young readers for years to come.