Good Night Captain Mama

A quick zip through the children’s section at my local bookstore (yes, I’m one of those people) reveals that books have moved beyond my childhood favorite, Dr. Seuss, and are now available to help children understand concepts ranging from cancer to divorce to adoption.

What there haven’t been, and still aren’t many of, are books that help military children understand what their parents do and why what they do is so different from what other parents do. This is particularly true for female servicemembers.

Thankfully, fellow veteran Graciela Tiscareño-Sato is changing that with her new children’s book.

Good Night Captain Mama, Buenas Noches Capitán Mamá is a wonderful resource for those uniform-wearing mommies who want to read their kiddies a bedtime story about what they do.

And it does it, not in one language, but in two.

This bilingual story is based on a conversation between a female KC-135R navigator and her young son as he is preparing for bed and she is preparing for a night refueling mission.

His curiosity about her “costume” leads to a discussion about her flight suit, rank, unit patches, and mission. 

Each page holds a portion of their conversation written in both English and Spanish, with accompanying illustrations, done by Linda Lens. The story finishes with the little boy giving his mama an adorable, pajama-clad, stuffed puppy in the other hand, salute.

But. just when you think the story is over, the book holds a few more surprises – such as a template for your child to draw his/her own uniform patch and “cool links,” including to an organization that helps empower young girls by introducing them to aviation – kind of like the author, Graciela Tiscareño-Sato, does.

Tiscareño-Sato is a former Air Force officer, speaker, owner of the marketing and publishing firm Gracefully Global Group, LLC, journalist, blogger, author of the award-winning and bestselling book, Latinnovating, and a founding member of the new National Women Veterans Speakers Bureau.

On top of all that, she is a mother of three, who says she wrote the draft of the bilingual children’s book and the entire marketing plan for it in one night.

(She would also later publish it so that she would own all the intellectual property rights, not just the author’s rights, and thereby multiply her profit by tenfold – how’s that for entrepreneurship?)

If I haven’t convinced you to pick up the book for the military mommies you know, here’s an added bonus: a portion of the sales of the book go to support V-WISE, the entrepreneur training program created for women veterans by Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families.

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