Chasten Buttigieg is releasing a children’s book & it’s super adorable

Chasten Buttigieg is raising three-year-old twins with his very busy husband, out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and both men have to travel sometimes for work. So Chasten decided to write a children’s book about the sense of anticipation a family feels whenever dad is about to return home from a business trip.

The book is called Papa’s Coming Home. Its story follows JoJo and Rosie, two siblings who can’t wait to welcome their traveling Papa home. The kids make signs and pick flowers and then help their daddy bake a cake and pack the car with things Papa might’ve missed while he was away. The only problem: When they meet and hug Papa at the airport, the family car is so filled with goodies that there’s no place for Papa to sit!

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“I just wanted a story, a day in the life of a family like ours, and I wanted my kids to see themselves in one of these stories,” Chasten Buttigieg recently told People magazine. “I was working on this particular story on an airplane and thinking about how excited I was to get home to my kids, and that shared experience of excitement for someone to come home, especially a parent who you’ve been missing and that unconditional love for your kid that’s the best thing in the world to come home to.”

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The book shows same-sex parents, a rarity in children’s picture books. In this case, the siblings and their fathers are illustrated by Dan Taylor, and Chasten Buttigieg said that the pictures are a huge part of the book’s special message.

“The most powerful thing that has happened so far is getting the art back from the book and looking at the art,” he said. “My kids came into the kitchen and saw me working on my laptop, and I was going through the art and Penelope just went, ‘That’s me. And that’s Gus and that’s Daddy.’ It’s just really, really special that she saw herself immediately.”

This isn’t the first book that Chasten Buttigieg has written. In September 2020, he released I Have Something to Tell You: A Memoir, a frank discussion of his experience growing up gay in middle America. That book was 256 pages and meant for older readers, so he had to get into a different mindset to write something for younger readers, he said.

“Figuring out a story that squeezes into 20-30 pages was difficult for me,” he said, “but getting in the mind of a toddler was easier because I was right in it with the books that we’re reading right now.”

Chasten Buttigieg told the aforementioned publication that he and his husband developed the story during their daily story night with their kids.

“As the improv theater kid, [story time] is very fun,” he said. “It’s also very fun to watch Pete have to do this, but this is where I would test out some of these characters. We would tell stories about a family and what they did, and you can kind of see [the kids’] faces rise and fall and see what works and what doesn’t work.”

“I just wanted this book to show unconditional love,” he continued, “that’s the thing that we tell our kids when we go to bed every night, when we tuck them in and kiss them good night — that they’re so loved and they’re so wanted…. There’s so many things in my life that I appreciate, but that kind of love you have for your kid is so strong. That’s the only thing I want to come home to.”

The book is being published by Penguin Random House and will hit bookshelves on May 13, 2025.

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