I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.

I've been lucky enough to have made enough of these types of children's books that while I don't necessarily know what works, I know what doesn't work. I've got a sense of the rhythm and the form. With this series, I get to play with ideas that I would never have myself.

All of the life-changing awesome words and pictures and ideas inside your library are useless without just one word outside your library: Open.

I bet your mom would let me." -Pigeon, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus-

Kids are super-independent. This is the time when you don't need your parents for a story anymore. You have a great degree of agency and independence.

Aggle flabble kabble . . . snurp?

I also learn a lot about everybody else's process. People create in different ways, so that has opened me up to different processes and experimenting. Laurie Keller is a character person, so she came to the project with these blades-of-grass characters that we were able to literally grow a story around.