This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

I’m on vacation this week, so instead of a regular newsletter, I decided to examine a children’s classic that has been taking up a lot of my brain space lately. Back next week!

Raising children frequently offers one the opportunity to revisit the touchstones of one’s youth with a more experienced, critical eye. Who among us has not wondered how Garfield knows that it is Monday, or why Mickey is a mouse who owns a dog?

But perhaps no artifact of children’s pop culture feels more bizarre, more confounding, or, on closer inspection, more fascinating, to me than the multivolume story of Amelia Bedelia.

Written by Peggy Parish from 1963 to 1988, and continued by her nep

See Full Page