A gentle bedtime story that teaches little ones to care for their Foot, Body & Soul. Born from a chance meeting on the Camino de Santiago and more than fifteen years of caring for families, it is the children’s self-care picture book we always wished existed. Now it does.
There is a moment most parents know by heart. The day has been long and loud. Dinner is cleared, the screens have finally gone dark, and a small, over-full child needs help finding the way back down to calm. So you reach for a story, because a story is how children have always been carried gently toward sleep.
The Dreams of the Penguins was written for exactly that moment, and for all the small moments around it.
On a quiet stretch of Antarctic ice, a tender little Emperor penguin named Baby Pax curls up to sleep, and his Penguin Family begins to teach him the three things that will keep him well for the rest of his life: how to care for his Foot, his Body, and his Soul. Page by gentle page, in warm rhymes and soft full-color art, the penguins show Baby Pax, and the child reading along beside you, that small daily habits add up to a big, healthy, joyful life.
It is a bedtime story. It is also, quietly, a child’s very first lesson in taking care of themselves.
A book we kept looking for, until we made it
For years, families have asked us for something we could never quite find on a shelf. Parents wanted a calm, beautiful book that could teach a young child the things that actually shape a healthy life: how to rest, how to breathe through a big feeling, how to move and stretch, how to be kind to a body that works so hard for them. There are wonderful picture books about feelings, and lovely books about bedtime. But a true children’s self-care book, one that gently teaches the body and the heart together, was simply missing.
We think that gap matters more now than ever. Children today are growing up in the fastest, most distracting world there has ever been. Calm has quietly become something a child has to be taught, rather than something the day hands them for free, and the gentle rituals that once passed naturally from grandparent to parent to child are easy to lose in the noise.
The idea at the center of the book is simple, and it echoes the heart of Dr. Peter Attia’s Outlive: a long, healthy life is not built from one big decision. It is built from small choices, repeated daily, begun early. The Dreams of the Penguins takes that grown-up truth and plants it where it can do the most good, in the imagination of a young child, where good habits take root early and grow up right alongside them.
What the penguins teach
The Penguin Family practices three parts of self-care every day, and the whole book is built around them.
Foot is where care begins, because your feet carry you everywhere you go. The penguins show that feet deserve something back: easy steps, warm soaks, slow stretches, and a gentle foot massage at the end of a busy day.
Body is the engine that works for you, awake and asleep. The penguins teach the everyday things that keep it strong: eating well, staying active, sleeping deeply, and mindful, slow breathing for the moments when the world feels like too much.
Soul is where a child’s dreams and feelings live. The penguins keep it strong with time together, quiet moments, creativity, sharing what is on your heart, and a little self-kindness.
What makes the book special is how it teaches. Each spread pairs a tender rhyme with a real, true “fun fact” a child will love repeating at the dinner table, the kind of small wonder that makes a young reader feel they have uncovered a secret about their own body. One page alone reveals that there are more than seven thousand nerve endings in a single foot, and there are many more delights waiting inside. Caring touch and gentle massage run through the pages too, never as anything clinical, but as one of the warmest things a family can share: a parent’s hands soothing a child’s tired feet, a small moment of closeness at the end of the day.
In the most natural way, it is a first science book about the body, a first lesson in emotional regulation, and a calm bedtime story, all at once. And it does not only talk. The back of the book invites a child to draw their own most peaceful moment, to check in on their own Foot, Body, and Soul, and to name a big dream and help it soar. Children ask to hear it again and again, which is the truest review a picture book can earn.
Born of sincronicidad
This book was not planned. It was, as we have come to believe, meant to be.
While walking the Camino de Santiago across Spain, celebrating my fiftieth birthday and reflecting on the long river of life, I met a young and gifted artist named Luanda Pinto Guasch. She had a master’s degree in fine art, a shelf of published children’s books, and a quiet study of art therapy for children. More than any of that, she had the rare gift of turning feelings into shapes a child can understand.
When I shared my idea for a Penguin Family who teaches self-care, Luanda told me our meeting felt like sincronicidad, a meaningful encounter that feels guided rather than accidental. She carried on her shoulder a small tattoo of the wind trigram from the I Ching, an ancient symbol of movement, intuition, and the unseen forces that gently steer a life. There, on a road walked by pilgrims for a thousand years, we made a simple promise to create this book together, her art and my vision. That is how The Dreams of the Penguins came quietly into being, arriving, the way the best things do, at exactly the right time.
The lovable Penguin Pax characters were brought to life by our longtime designer, Mariia Pundel, and the manuscript was shaped with great care by our book coach, Sharon Skinner. What began as a single idea on a pilgrimage became a book held by many loving hands.
The synchronicity did not stop in Spain
We have learned that sincronicidad, what we might also call 缘分, does not only happen in faraway places. It keeps happening, close to home, wherever this little book travels.
When I brought a copy to donate to Fall City Elementary School, where my youngest, Benny, is in kindergarten, the librarian, Ms. Shepherd, looked at the penguin on the cover and asked me, “Are you from Cloud 9?” I was stunned. She had recognized the penguin at once, because she comes to Cloud 9 all the time, and so do her family and her friends. When she learned I was the founder, she pulled a PTA officer, Danielle, over just to share the moment, and Danielle lit up too, because she is one of our guests as well. “My gosh,” Ms. Shepherd said, “this is my massive, massive moment.” She is placing the book in the library and in three first-grade classrooms, for teachers to read when the children study animals.
Another encounter came from inside our own walls. Sarah, who had been part of the Cloud 9 family for years, was talking with us about the penguins when she showed us a small penguin tattoo on her calf, one she had carried, quietly, for a long time. None of us had known. And then we learned that she works at Cedar Crest Academy in Redmond, another quiet bridge between this book and the children who might love it most. Different people, different penguins, and the same quiet feeling every time: that none of these meetings are truly accidental.
These are the stories that keep us going. They are also why our front desk teams are personally carrying copies of the book to daycares, pediatric offices, and school libraries near each of our locations. A book about caring for children belongs first in the hands of the people who care for them.
A keepsake, made to last
The Dreams of the Penguins was made to be kept. It is a hardcover and paperback picture book, printed in full color across sixty-six pages of original artwork, in a wide landscape format that gives every illustration room to breathe. It was written for children roughly ages three to eight, and it is treasured just as easily by the grandparents and parents who read it aloud, which makes it a thoughtful gift for new parents, grandparents, and any family that loves the quiet magic of bedtime stories.
For the teachers, librarians, and booksellers who choose books for a living, here is what we hope you will see in it. A genuine, beautifully made picture book that fills a real and growing need. A family wellness storybook that is also a body-science book, a social and emotional learning resource, and a calming bedtime read, all in a single volume. It is illustrated by a trained artist and art therapist, anchored by a clear and teachable framework a child can actually carry into the rest of their life, and it teaches self-kindness without preaching and wellness without a single worried word.
It also carries a quiet authority that few children’s books can. It was written by people who spend every day caring for human bodies, and who wanted, at last, to write down for families the small, true things they have learned.
The family behind the penguins
That brings us, finally, to where the penguins come from.
Cloud 9 Foot Spa, known to our guests as America’s Family-Friendly Spa, has been caring for families since 2010. Over more than fifteen years, we have welcomed tens of thousands of children, teens, parents, and grandparents into the same warm rooms and the same gentle rituals of care for the Foot, Body, and Soul. What began in the San Francisco Bay Area has grown into a family of neighborhood spas reaching from California to Texas and up into the Pacific Northwest, with Las Vegas on the way. Five years ago I moved north to the forested side of Seattle, and the same care that started in the Bay came along with me.
What has always made Cloud 9 different is who you will find resting side by side in our rooms. Not one generation, but three. Grandparents and grandchildren, reclining next to one another, wrapped in the same gentle care. That is the spirit we tried to fold into every page of this book, the belief that caring for yourself, and caring for one another, is for every age and every family.
The Dreams of the Penguins is our way of bringing those rituals home, so that the calm a family feels with us can live on their own bookshelf, in their own quiet evenings, in the small daily pauses that shape a child’s whole life. If, after meeting the penguins, your family is ever curious to feel that same kind of care in person, our door is always open. But the book asks nothing of you except a few quiet minutes at bedtime, which may be among the most valuable things any of us can give a child.
Bring the penguins home
We believe the foundations of a healthy life are planted in childhood, in small steps, the way the penguins teach. There is a will, there is a way. For us the will has always been simple: to help children learn early to care for their Foot, Body, and Soul, so that their dreams grow as strong as they do.
May the Penguin Family walk with your family for years to come. And may your steps be light, your heart be strong, and your dreams reach all the way to Cloud 9.
To reserve or order a copy for your family, visit dreamsofpenguins.com
Warmly,
Sean Peng
Founder, Cloud 9 Foot Spa
Written from the forested side of Seattle, in view of Mount Rainier
