Striped Chipmunk Provides a Great Family Lesson

Thornton W. Burgess’s books have delighted children for over one hundred years. His stories bring nature to life and help readers discover the value of adhering to the timeless principles of honesty, hard-work, and kindness and the cost of laziness, lying and stealing.

In this tale of Striped Chipmunk’s great, great, ever so great grandfather, the Merry Little Breezes learn how old Mr. Chipmunk earned his striped coat by his selfless act of courage.

Peter Rabbit, Johnny Chuck, Grandfather Frog and other Animals Teach Important Values

Thornton W. Burgess’s books (see Books by Thornton W. Burgess), whose cast of characters are the forest and meadow creatures, delighted children in the early to mid nineteen hundreds. The author paints wonderful word pictures that both entertain and educate. His first book Old Mother West Wind begins as follows:

The Opportunity in Problems

During the course of our lives problems will arise: within our families, at work, or in organizations to which we belong. Our first reaction is often to cringe, deny and wonder why me. Let me put forth the notion that, rather than cringe at them, we view problems as an opportunity to improve our relationship with family, customers, co-workers, or fellow members.

To illustrate my point I’d like to share a story from my first job out of college. I was working for Motorola as a software engineer where my responsibilities included developing custom software for our CAD/CAM systems. By the end of my first year I had developed a number of new features for our CAD System to help speed up the design process for our circuit board designers. One afternoon, after I had made an enhancement to one of the features and reinstalled it, the designers complained that their systems were not behaving properly. After they explained what happened, I immediately knew what was wrong. I had made a small coding error and was able to fix it within a couple of minutes.