a family decides to take all the paint and paint the different parts of their house
great colors in illustrations
1 book

One Saturday morning while their parents are away, the three Noonan children decide to paint the house.

The message is that parents should never leave kids unattended with the right supplies to start a project. Kids should follow rules and not come up with ideas of their own. It is a great example to read to students for rule breakers and how the results may look from an audience.

This review also appears on my blog.

The three Noonan children, mistakenly left at home without a babysitter, decide to spend their day helping out by painting the house. Oh, won't their parents be happy!



Peter Spier's Oh, Were They Ever Happy! follows the children from beginning ("I do not know who thought of it first, but there was plenty of paint in the garage.") to end ("Sure looks swell! Won't they be happy when they come home and see what we've done!"). As the children go along, they gradually become messier and the house gradually becomes more colorful, as the children use as many colors of paint as it takes to finish the job.



The children even clean up, when they're done! Won't their parents be happy!

This is a very fun book. They story's amusing as the children go along, happily 'helping' by painting their house (windows and all!). With each passing page, it hardly seems that the mess could get any bigger, but turn the page and it's messier still. The art is simple, colorful (and how!), and perfectly pleasant. Altogether, this book rather reminds me of Wacky Wednesday.

Spier won the Caldecott medal in 1978 for Noah's Ark, which is (mostly) wordless, but has a similar style of art.

Strangely, Oh, Were They Ever Happy! seems not to be in print, and the prices at Amazon are higher than expected, but if you do come by a copy, it's surely worth a read.

When their parents must go out for a day to run errands, and the baby-sitter never turns up, the three Noonan children - inspired by their mother's observation that the house needs painting - decide to be extra helpful, and get the job done themselves! Grabbing all the half-full paint cans in the garage and basement, they transform their house (as well as garage and fence), working hard all day under the supervision of the family dog and cat. Won't their parents be surprised and happy, when they see the colorful results!?!

This book had me giggling almost from the very beginning, and I appreciated the wild and colorful mayhem throughout - the poor dog, who ended up with a pink head! - as well as the young Noonans' innocent good intentions. The final product of all their hard work is not to be missed, nor is the final line of the book, which is a masterpiece of irony! ( )