Highlights of the month – Dori Hillestad Butler

It’s been quite a month. I’ve only been home two weekdays (six days total, the entire month). I breeze in…do my laundry…pet the dog…hug the family…and breeze back out again.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Texas Library Association convention (Buddy Files #1 is on the Texas Bluebonnet list for this next year) where I met wonderful librarians (a librarian really is a children’s book author’s best friend!), signed a ton of books, and ate Amy’s Ice Cream (which is just as entertaining of an ice cream shop as Coldstone, but serves better ice cream) and fried pickles (Awesome!)…and no I’m not pregnant.

I also got to meet the librarian (maybe I should capitalize that: The Librarian!) from the Texas library where the infamous babysitter is challenging my My Mom’s Having a Baby…she talked to me, shook my hand, and was even willing to be photographed with me and The Book:

And James Howe (see previous two entries to understand why that is significant, aside from the fact that James Howe is awesome!):

We had a nice (but brief) chat about censorship…and I got a signed ARC of his new book!

I’ve also done A LOT of school visits this month. All great schools…great kids…here are a few highlights from some of the schools:

This picture is from a school where everyone brought a stuffed animal to school to read to the day before I arrived. The animals stayed in the P-O-U-N-D most of the day, then they came out for reading:

I think this school wins the prize for best author display. I LOVE the cap on Buddy:

I like the chart that this school made.

And the writing assignments the second graders at this school did (they read part of The Case of the Library Monster, then did some research and wrote letters to Buddy offering help in solving this case). Can you tell those are pictures of blue-tongued skinks?