Wife Surprises Husband By Publishing Children's Book He Wrote As Kid

A loving wife secretly published her husband’s children’s book he wrote when he was seven years old and gifted it to him. The emotional moment was captured no camera as Daryl Elliot Jr., 35, unwrapped the present to see his children’s novel Barumbus from Barbaytus staring back at him. The book, which he penned as a child himself, was something he would read to his own young daughter, Natalie, but this was from an old, beaten-up textbook he had kept over from his school days. The story tells how Barumbus, a fictional character in a fictional place, is seen as boring until his friends cheer him up. Natalie and Daryl loved the story, and so Daryl’s wife, Chelsea, 30, from Columbus, Ohio, began working on the big surprise, as she did not know how much longer the textbook could last. Knowing how much the family loved the story, Chelsea began looking into how to get the book published – even hiring an illustrator to bring a seven-year-old Daryl’s drawings of Barumbus to life. Once illustrator Juanita Golondrina had finished the images, Chelsea spent a month working on getting the book turned into a published work. The loving wife – who said she fell in love with Daryl’s writing because his dating app profile was so well written – also managing to make the book available for purchase on Amazon. And on Christmas Day, Daryl opened the Amazon package to find his children’s novel staring back at him - and immediately burst into floods of tears when he realized what had happened. Daryl had been waiting for this moment for a number of years, Chelsea said, as he had taken the book from his parents’ house when they moved and always intended to publish it.