Belles on Their Toes by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

I'd never read this sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, mainly because I didn't really realize that this existed. But I saw it while I was reading on Wikipedia about the Gilbreth parents and wanted to finish the story of the Gilbreth family after their father died. This book mostly is about the first few struggling years after their father died, but the last few chapters are also about much later, when the youngest is in high school and graduating from college, and ends with a family reunion after WWII when all the boys are back from the war and the family is all back together. I really enjoyed this one, mainly because I loved seeing all the favorite characters from the first book all back together again, and hearing about how they made it after losing their dad. There were some really funny episodes in this book which made me laugh too. But it doesn't quite hold up to the original (possibly just for the nostalgic reasons which is why I love it so much anyway). It was very reassuring and satisfying to read about how Lillian Gilbreth managed to make her way leading her husband's company and keeping the family together, in an era where most women were looked at as not capable of working in a men's world like that. She developed such concepts as the efficiency kitchen, and the book talked a little bit about how she came up with it--mostly because she figured as a woman, people would be more likely to listen to her if she came to them with ideas to improve the kitchen instead of the workplace. Some of those aspects I would have liked to learn more about (but Wikipedia gave some good information, and I get why the kids didn't really write about it in their book, which was more about the family and the kids).