Bull­doz­er Helps Out came about, in part, because the char­ac­ters from Bulldozer’s Big Day stayed with me; they charmed me. I’d got­ten to know them in the first book, and felt there were more adven­tures to be told. I real­ly want­ed to find out what would hap­pen next in Bulldozer’s life.

Sequels, how­ev­er, are always hard because they have to be bet­ter than the first book, or at least dif­fer­ent enough to dis­tin­guish them­selves. And I cer­tain­ly didn’t want to repeat myself.

Then I hit upon the idea of Bull­doz­er being too lit­tle to join his truck fam­i­ly in the rough, tough work of the con­struc­tion site. As the for­mer moth­er of lit­tle boys, I clear­ly remem­ber the frus­tra­tion my guys expe­ri­enced when they couldn’t help paint the bed­room, or cut up car­rots. “I’m big enough!” they’d cry. “I can do it!” As so does Bulldozer.

Worn out by my lit­tle ones’ pleas, I would even­tu­al­ly find some way for them to help out—stirring the paint, wash­ing the car­rots. And so does Bulldozer’s truck fam­i­ly. Like me, they give him a small job, away from the dan­ger­ous work. They believe he can man­age it.

I don’t want to give it away, but the sto­ry has some sur­pris­es not typ­i­cal­ly found in books with con­struc­tion truck char­ac­ters. This was pur­pose­ful. I want­ed to break away from the tropes a bit. I want­ed kids to see them­selves in Bull­doz­er. After all, he might be a truck, but he’s got the heart and mind of a Kinder­garten­er. And like all Kinder­garten­ers, he wants to help the grownups in his life (who, in this case, just hap­pen to be big­ger trucks). Will he suc­ceed? The con­clu­sion, I hope, is both sweet and sat­is­fy­ing. And lit­tle Bull­doz­er? He ends up with the rough­est, tough­est job of them all … tak­ing care of lit­tle ones.