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Brad Thiessen

By Jenn Director Knudsen

Each month, iParenting.com spotlights a father who inspires and moves us, who embodies the qualities that we all admire in a person, a man and a father. Above all, the Dad of the Month is dedicated to his children. Rich or poor, famous or not, he shines as an example of what fathering is all about.

Our choice for October is Brad Thiessen, children's book author and father of two.

One month after the birth of Brad Thiessen's second son, Thiessen suffered his first grand mal seizure. Thiessen recalls his exhausted wife, new baby boy and then-3-year-old son all were napping in their Fresno, Calif., home. So he took the opportunity to relax in a rocking chair. And that's where his wife found him, "stiff as a board, with my eyes rolled back in my head," he says of that scary October day in 2001.

Thiessen has no idea how long he was like that in the rocking chair; he says the next thing he remembered was coming to in an ambulance and being asked if he was on drugs. Far from it. His emergency-room doctor told Thiessen a malignant level-III (of IV) brain tumor located just above his right ear caused his seizure. And it would need to be removed, immediately.

Thiessen, 36, says his tumor was discovered on a Monday, and it was out the following Saturday. Next came a six-month course of radiation and chemotherapy.

And he says he is lucky. The chemo did not lead to hair loss. The only physical reminder of his brain tumor is the small, bald patch the radiation treatment left behind, above his right ear, where his brown hair no longer grows.

The tumor, he says, may be gone, but the cancer from which it grew most likely will regenerate and literally be the death of him. "We're all going to die," Thiessen says. "But I really know I'm gonna die. I have to say, honestly, I don't know what to do with it."

He may not know what to do with this medical knowledge about his mortality, but he is doing even more these days to get the most out of his life, both with his family and in his professional pursuits. As of September of this year, Thiessen's third job title – aside from father of two and public relations professional – is children's book author.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Thiessen says from a young age he had great interest in – and a natural facility with – writing. "I had done a fair bit of writing as a child, as a teen," including of stories and plays, he says. "And I had numerous teachers along the way who nurtured my creativity."

Including a fifth-grade teacher who encouraged her students to write original stories she then submitted to a local radio station. Thiessen says many of his tales got read over the air. And, as a sixth-grader, he submitted another original that a local television station picked up and turned into a one-off animated feature.

Years later, at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, Thiessen studied English literature, music theory and music composition. But, he says, "I came to a point where I realized that I loved literature, but I didn't want to study it." He recalls thinking, "I don't have this passion to study lit."

So he went on eventually to pursue PR jobs. Today, Thiessen is the public relations director for a Fresno-based seminary, a job he does about 30 hours a week from home, two states away from California. He does graphic design and writing – all via the Internet – for the school's three campuses and roughly 300 students.

Thiessen says when he and his wife, Rachelle Ventura, 35, married in 1990, they laid out certain priorities for themselves and the children they hoped to have. High on the couple's list was to live near family. For a time, they lived in Edmonton. "Within a year of making that a priority, we moved to Fresno," says Thiessen with a nervous chuckle.

And relatively shortly after that move to California's hot and smoggy Central Valley, Ventura learned she was pregnant with the couple's first child. Kyle Thiessen was born in 1998, and his brother, Evan Thiessen, followed in 2002. Both were born in Fresno, where the air quality became so poor that the boys developed respiratory problems, Thiessen says. He believes Fresno's air quality is among the worst in the nation.

In fact, a May 2005 Fresno Bee article reported one in six Fresno County children had asthma and that every year 1100 premature deaths are blamed on particulate-matter pollution. "We were seeing ourselves developing lots of allergies," and the family didn't want to become "victims of (our) environment," Thiessen says. Nor, he adds, of inertia.

Thiessen's 2001 cancer experience, his boys' potentially compromised health and the couple's original priority to live near family finally spurned Thiessen and his wife to leave California's literally stifling Central Valley for a different clime. "We had to think, 'Now, is it worth the discomfort of moving?' Yes it was," Thiessen says.

In May – the same month of the Fresno Bee's report – the family settled in Spokane in eastern Washington, an 11-hour drive to family in Canada. There, Ventura, who holds a double master's in music, musicology and piano performance from the University of Alberta, home-schools the couple's sons and, of course, has introduced Kyle to their upright piano.

And Thiessen, working in his home office during the work week, now is privy to all his sons' daily activities and gets to spend much more time with them than when he worked at the Fresno seminary school's office and returned home at 6 p.m. each night. "That was my worst part of the day and it was my sons', too," he says of the witching hour. "That now (working from home and remotely from the seminary) gives me the freedom to see them more. That doesn't mean every time we interact we're happy and jolly."

But he has way more time with them than ever before. "That's of course important time," he says. As is that spent every week swimming at their nearby YMCA and playing croquet on their lawn, Frisbee and badminton.

"We're trying to keep them physically active in any way we can," Thiessen says of his boys.

Kyle says he and his dad often roller blade, play cards and do "lots of stuff" together. "He's a very nice person," Kyle says. "He loves to play games, and he loves interacting with me."

Thiessen also is involved on weekends, preparing "almost every Saturday" apple buttermilk pancakes the kids look forward to wolfing down.

As for nightly activities, reading plays a big role in the Thiessen-Ventura household. Thiessen says his boys check out up to 30 books each week from their county and city libraries, and he and his wife read to their sons every night at bedtime.

Books aren't the source of every story told, though. One night, Kyle, then 4, asked his dad to tell him a story, off the cuff, one he'd never heard of or told before. "It's a lot of work to come up with a story on the spot," Thiessen says. But he did, and he eventually turned it into his first children's book.

"I just told the story one night," he says, adding the main character – a troll who tickles instead of scares – wasn't hard to come up with, but the story line was.

Orso: The Troll Who Couldn't Scare (CDS Books, 2005) written by Thiessen and illustrated by friend and cohort, Jeremy Balzer, is a boldly illustrated 32-page children's book with layers of meaning.

The story is of a young troll, who, despite his father's scaring lessons, is incapable of scaring others; and "Orso" tells of a child whose interests diverge from his father's instead of a youth who follows his elder's wishes. In a reversal, the father ends up following his child's path. Barnes & Nobles bookstores will be featuring Orso for Halloween; the publisher printed 11,000 copies of the book.

"It seems to me that we as adults have this pretension ... (that) by default we know things," Thiessen says of his thoughts while writing the book and coming up with its counterintuitive ending. "I don't really think that's really true; we continually have to learn lessons."

Freelance illustrator and graphic designer, Balzer, says working with Thiessen – on Orso and forthcoming projects – is fun despite the hard work involved. "Working with Brad has been one of the most rewarding work experiences in my life," says Balzer, 30, of Denver, Colo. "I know that his venture into the career of writing children's stories is because his son asked him to tell a story no one's ever heard, and Brad did just that. A number of the stories he's written are based on his kids, and I know he spends a lot of time with them."

Thiessen says he does have many original manuscripts of children's books in the works, and he hopes to dabble in other forms of creative writing. He says "years ago" he worked on screenplays but they took too much time. Time he now knows more than ever is a very precious commodity and cannot be squandered on people or projects that aren't top priority.

Unlike his family and his new writing ventures that do. "Life is short," he says, "I've been told as much."

Thiessen says his top priorities are to "just be" with his sons and also satisfy the "desires and hungers I have to fulfill, as well."

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