#Mom transforms children’s book covers into tales of the coronavirus

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Stefanie Trilling redesigned the covers of children’s books to help her two kids cope with the COVID crisis.
Gittings Photography

At the peak of the COVID-19 crisis in Manhattan, ambulance sirens wailed all day long outside the two-bedroom apartment where Stefanie Trilling lives with her husband, two children, aged 5 ½ and 2, and their dog. “It was really upsetting. Because my daughter is old enough to understand what was going on, she’d ask, ‘Do the people in the ambulance have coronavirus? Are they going to die?’ ” says Trilling. “I didn’t have the answers. The best I could do was say, ‘I don’t know, but we’re going to do the best we can to stay safe as a family, and that’s why we’re staying inside.’ So then I went to the distraction technique.”

She found it in art: Specifically, in reworking children’s book covers.

“One day I took out the paint,” says Trilling, who had never previously painted much. “I see one of the Elephant and Piggie books [the children’s series by Mo Willems]. I started painting the characters, and I started painting in a cartoonified coronavirus and I changed ‘Piggie’ to ‘COVID-19.’ ”

She posted it on Instagram to share with her friends, who loved it and demanded that she do another cover. So she did “Pete the Cat and the Bad Corona.” Then her ideas started snowballing, one cover after another. “Green Eggs and Wash Your Hands,” “The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Time Home,” “Llama Llama Hasn’t Changed Pajamas.”

And that’s how Children’s Books for Pandemics, now a wildly popular social media phenomenon, was born. (“Multimedia parodist finding the best in a collectively bad situation,” reads Trilling’s Instagram bio.)

While painting helped the time go by, the colorful covers provided Trilling with a non-threatening way to discuss the situation with her daughter. “We talked about what viruses are and why we were staying in. It gave her the context in which she could ask questions.”

She hopes to sell prints and use a portion of the proceeds to help children in hard-hit neighborhoods.

And as for whether this has made her see the city differently?

“I see a lot of friends who are leaving, just packing up their apartments,” says Trilling. “But this is my home. This is where I’ve built my family. This is where I live, and this is where I love. It’s in a state of transition, but I know we’re going to come out on the other side, and I want to be a part of it.”