Lydia Lion Goes Exploring: Ten Exciting Adventures of a Lion Cub

By Jim Spensley

Lydia Lion Goes Exploring is a collection of fresh and realistic read-aloud stories about a little lion cub discovering her world. Lydias adventures dramatically create an aura of danger or mishap for young listeners.

Lydia is a lot like kids want to be: out there doing their own thing, scary as it may be.

Each adventure is a stand-alone story involving other African animals. Each story ends with a comfortable resolution of the anxious moments of the day.

Lydia Lion Goes Exploring! is available in print or e-book.

More: www.lydialion.com

Endorsement. Lydia Lion and her brothers are captivating characters growing-up in their ever-expanding world. Lydia is independent, inquisitive and adventurous: a wonderful role model for girls and their siblings. She ventures further and further beyond her comfort zone, and along the way exposes herself and her siblings to new experiences that are realistic and believable.

Lydia Lion Goes Exploring has no anthropomorphic cartoon stories, but engages young listeners and readers while also teaching valuable lessons about life and animals in the wild.

Highly recommended to parents and teachers to read aloud or have children read alone. Carol Pfleiderer, Educator

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491748480

Jim Spensley

Jim Spensley is the father of three children to whom he read or told stories nightly. Lydia Lion was made up as he went. Lydia’s adventures became favorite bedtime stories that were recorded. A now-retired systems engineer and manager, Jim’s more extensive writings were technical papers and reports, proposals, and political campaign materials. As teens and young adults, his two daughters requested that the Lydia Lion stories be transcribed and re-written for their use as baby-sitters, later as part-time care-givers. Once Jim retired, the daughters encouraged (demanded) that the stories be refined for publication. Jim lives with his wife in Minnesota and Arizona.

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Copyright © 2015 Jim Spensley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4849-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4848-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917455

iUniverse rev. date: 1/06/2015

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Story 1 Lydia Lion and the Python Waiting

Story 2 Lydia Lion and the Crocodile Attack

Story 3 Lydia Lion and the Leopard Stalking

Story 4 Lydia Lion and the Hippopotamuses

Story 5 Lydia Lion Upsets Some Monkeys

Story 6 Lydia Lion and the Circling Hyenas

Story 7 Lydia Lion, Among the Wildebeest

Story 8 Lydia Lion and the Black Rhinoceros Charge

Story 9 Lydia Lion, Amid All Those Elephants

Story 10 Lydia Lion and the Buffalo Stampede

Appendices

A. Author’s Suggestions for Reading the Stories Aloud

B. Table of New Words

Author Biography

Dedication

For my three grandchildren: Catherine, Louise and Iver.

Epigraph

I hear babies cryin’. I watch them grow.

They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world!

What a Wonderful World Lyrics. (n.d.). Lyrics.net. Retrieved July 25, 2014, from http://www.lyrics.net/lyric/28123850. Copyright © Carlin America Inc.,

Acknowledgements

My uncle, Gurney Harris, my cousin, Les Harris, and the photo books of Joe McDonald originally led me to telling stories about Africa and African animals. My children, Alys, Anderson and Angelica, who first heard these stories unpolished, encouraged me. Marilyn Anderson and Carol Pfleiderer helped shape the stories and proof the copy.

The delightful drawings are by KJ Illustration Artists of Mumbai, India.

The iUniverse staffers were very helpful, particularly Kathi W. and Christine M.

Introduction

I grew up hearing stories about Africa from my African Uncle, a missionary stationed in the (then) Belgian Congo. Years later, I remembered the ones that were interesting and exciting.

One story was about a leopard taking a dog from their porch, with my cousin’s crib just inside an open window. It was a real scary story.

My African Cousin, also a missionary, had an African Rock Python skin over 10 feet long that he used in presentations. He told about being called to a small village to see to the demise of an extra-large python that had swallowed a kid goat, whole. That was also a real scary story.

My Lydia Lion stories were first made-up from scratch, 30 some years ago, for bedtimes for my two daughters and my son. My kids expected high drama in any story; they rejected stories without a scary part. I’d introduce big words and define them in the stories. (I wound up writing myself notes so I could tell a story a second or fifth time with the same vocabulary.) I was drafted to tell Lydia stories to their pre-school and kindergarten classes. This book’s scratch is ancient.

Years later, when my daughters read some of the Lydia Lion stories to youngsters while baby-sitting or working with young children in groups, Moms