Denis and I signed Hush Little Monster together
This past Saturday we participated in the Princeton Children’s Book Festival. It was a beautiful day for celebrating children’s books!
We met a lot of interesting authors and illustrators and wonderfully supportive parents buying books. It was also great to see old friends.
With Anne Rockwell, author of Truck Stop, and her daughter and illustrator, Lizzy Rockwell
With Denise Dowling-Mortensen, author of Good Night Engines and Wake Up Engines–we met in 2004, the year Jamie was born and when Good Night Engines was released.
I made mini donuts to hand out — they looked like these and the recipe is here:
Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of them — I was too distraught over finding my cake stand had broken en route! The good news was that the pile of donuts quickly disappeared within the first couple of hours.
Jamie was a trooper and didn’t mind having to be with us at the festival all day long with no playmates. He wandered about the four tents of 20 authors and illustrators and looked at books, sampled treats, and had his program signed by all 80 of them!
Table seating of each tent
He also scored cute drawings from Dave Roman (author/illustrator of the Astronaut Academy series) and Alexis Fredrick Frost (of Adventures in Cartooning fame):
By Alexis Fredrick Frost
Thank you so much for being so kind to my son!
Jamie also got to choose a couple books for himself and a friend which he had signed by Dave Roman and Fiona Robertson. It’s so special when you can give and receive an autographed copy!
By Dave Roman
By Eva Ibbotson, Illustrated by Fiona Robertson
I knew it would be a long day of meeting people and signing books, as well as traveling to and from the event. It’s the kind of situation where you never know if you’ll get really hungry in a place where there might not be healthy, portable options available. In preparation, I made a dozen Shelly’s Chocolate Protein Mini Muffins to bring with us.
Chocolate Protein Mini Muffins
This recipe is from The World According to Eggface — a fantastic blog with lots of great recipes. These muffins came in handy when we were stranded on the platform after just missing our train back to the city! It was dinner time and we had to wait for the next train–in the end we were kind of glad we did, because we got to ride with more of our festival compatriots who arrived at the train station later. Plus, we weren’t hungry anymore!
This coming weekend, I have more book events. If you are in the NYC area, please come join me. I will be at Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street at South Portland, Brooklyn, NY) on Saturday, September 28 from 11- 12, reading Truck Stop and the board book version of B is for Bulldozer, which was just released this month! On Sunday, September 29, I will be on a panel with Anne Rockwell and several other authors at Books of Wonder (18 West 18th street between 5th and 6th Avenues) from 1-3 pm.
