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With a little transcribing help from their mom, Ayden and Colton Reiman wrote a book about a day in the life of living in their Kissimmee neighborhood. SUBMITTED PHOTO -
With a little transcribing help from their mom, Ayden and Colton Reiman wrote a book about a day in the life of living in their Kissimmee neighborhood. SUBMITTED PHOTO
Partin Settlement Elementary students Ayden and Colton Reiman know how to keep busy. The honor roll students are active in baseball, soccer, cross country, and golf. And over the past year, they’ve added becoming published authors to their schedules.
On March 9, their book “Our Golf Cart: A Reiman Boys Adventure,” went live on major bookseller websites. The story follows the boys and their mom as they set out on a golf cart ride through their Kissimmee neighborhood.
“This is an actual adventure,” Ayden and Colton’s mom, Penny Brown-Reiman, said. “We have a golf cart, and we tootle around in our neighborhood a lot with it. This was an actual day, one day in our life. We started in the morning just exploring and running around. As we were returning back at night, they said they had so much fun, it would be cool to write a book about it. I thought, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll do that. Sure, we’ll do that, no problem.’” “I got to thinking about it, and my mother has always said when they were little, their first walk or their first talk, ‘You know, you should write some things down,’ because she said as you get older, you forget about them.” So that’s what they proceeded to do.
Since Ayden and Colton were only in second and third grade at the time, they relied on their mom to do the actual writing. “We sat down and did the timeline together and decided, ‘What do we want to write about? Do we want to write about when we got the golf balls out of the water?’ It’s a collaboration,” she said.
The Reimans hired an illustration company to do the book’s illustrations. That process took around four to five months, she said, as the images of their neighborhood’s playground, par-three golf hole, and neighbors came to life.
“[The illustration] process is a direct reflection of what we told them to do and pictures going back and forth multiple times,” Brown-Reiman said. “If you live here and you know the area, and you look at the book, you’ll know our neighbors. These are real people. It’s actually all real. There’s little trees where we go in, where the kids hang out. It made it easier for the illustrations because sometimes we could just take a picture of us or a picture of an idea of what that area looked like and send it to the illustrators.”
Brown-Reiman said the boys’ favorite part of the process was probably seeing it come to life. “Your first sketches are just basic sketches.
Everything’s blurry and it’s just a rough sketch until you get the sketch the way you want, and then you worry about the colors later. So, I think seeing that develop was really funny to them and fun. They would run downstairs and ask, ‘Did we get our sketches in?’” Brown-Reiman hopes other families will join in the fun of creating their own adventures. “If you go out to dinner … you see kids on phones. You don’t see families talking anymore. Lots of times people don’t even eat together anymore in households. I feel like these adventures, if you make yourself do stuff with your kids, physical, outside, where you’re not on a computer, you’re not on a phone … that’s so healthy for family connections. That’s really the main point that my children and I want to make.”
The Reimans are planning to write a few more books in the future.
“We’ll continue to do our own adventures, but we would love to be able to inspire the community to get out and join us.”
