Night-night, me
my favorite friend.
Tomorrow we will play again.
Who would have thought that a couple of college friends would go on to write and illustrate the most delightful children’s bedtime book published in 2022?
Well, maybe no one expected it, but it happened.
Highland Falls’ Dr. Peter Gergely and one of his “most favorite friends in the galaxy”, Ted Scheu, recently collaborated on ‘Night-night, Body’, a children’s book which was published in April. Scheu wrote the poem that makes up the book, and Gergely, a renowned artist, illustrated it. The two met as students at Dartmouth College.
Sitting on the porch at his Roe Park home with his partner Val at his side recently, Gergely called illustrating the book a “labor of love”.
Scheu wrote the poem which is the text of the book, and then called Gergely in 2020. He had a publisher lined up, and after some negotiations (“they encouraged him not to work with a friend,” Gergely recalls) the poem (“which I loved,” he says) was Gergely’s to accentuate.
And that he did, with whimsical, intricate, illustrations which take the reader sweetly into sleep.
In Gergely’s words: “The text and illustration are a lovely meditation that takes the reader (and listener) on a trip around the world as she/he/they say “night-night” to all her/his/their important body parts, from tippy-toes to tippy-top.”
With the book, children will ‘travel’ to fifteen countries, five U.S. states, and outer-space as they settle into sleep — and every body part, from toenails to belly buttons to lungs to necks to tongues to faces and on and on is represented.
Gergely, a pediatrician who has operated Gergely Pediatrics in Garrison for 34 years, says he worked on the book through the pandemic, nightly, working five nights a week to meet every deadline “because I so badly wanted to do this”.
He called the process “uncomplicated” and said from the moment he began sketching the various pages of the book “it made me feel great”.
“This was a special project for me,” Gergely says, noting that often the children he saw in his practice were inspirational to him as he worked on the book — “When boys and girls came in with stuffed animals I almost always asked them if I could take a picture of the toys (‘they almost all said yes!’), and many of them are in the book.”
Gergely and Scheu didn’t reconnect just for this project — they’ve remained friends through the years.
“He is not only a gifted poet for kids, but also a skilled, inspiring teacher of writing. He comes to local schools like Haldane, in Cold Spring, nearly every year to help the young writers there find their own writer’s voices in poetry. His sense of humor hits all the right kid-buttons, much as I try to do in my work as a pediatrician, and as an illustrator,” Gergely said. “And like me, Ted is totally committed to the welfare of children. In fact, 10% of our profits from the book’s sales are going to a lovely literacy non-profit called, “Reach Out and Read.”
The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, as well as independent bookstores (he recommends Split Rock Books in Cold Spring, a favorite bookseller of his).
“Sales are good,” he admits, “people love to buy things connected to kids and, I think, it makes a great baby shower gift.”
That’s because, back to his ‘day job’, Gergely says a consistent bedtime routine is “critical” to a child’s good health.
The interactive website which supports the book — www.nightnightbody.com — also offers both “cool country information” and helpful sleep tips. The book, too, offers some parental prompts to talk to kids about bedtime and bedtime routines.
Books, Gergely strongly believes, are a very important part of those bedtime routines.
While Gergely spends much of his time in his office talking about things just like sleep, lately, at home, he’s been working to finish up a private watercolor commission for a friend whose daughter is about to graduate from college. He last had an art show in Brooklyn in 2017. Hudson Valley residents may remember that in 2007 he illustrated Katherine Whiteside’s ‘The Way We Garden Now’
Dr. Gergely hails from Nahant, Mass. — a tiny island town north of Boston. He graduated from Dartmouth, where he was an Art and Biology major. He took a year off and bicycled across Europe and then went to Tufts Medical School in Boston; joined the Army and trained at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., finishing a three-year residency in pediatrics with a concentration in childhood developmental pediatrics. He was assigned to West Point as a pediatrician at Keller Army Hospital; fell in love with the lower Hudson Valley and bought a house in Highland Falls and opened his practice … and here he stays!
