Off to Colorado!!

Exciting things all around!!   Going to Colorado to visit my daughter, Paula, and her husband Wes.  She's expecting a baby the first week of June.  Which means that Lynn and I will be hoping the baby arrives on the due date,  give or take 4 days:-)).    While there I'll be sharing Carty with a couple of groups and reading it to as many little ones as I can.   We're making progress on a second book "Rescue Ozzie" with the illustrator,  Leah Burke,  preparing sketches for me to look at towards the end of June.   And we have a third "Rescue Gummy".in the story phase!!    This is way more fun than I thought, especially reading the story to the children!!   They take it so much for REAL!!   God is truly blessing me unexpectedly with these books.    We are hopefully past some of our printing problems.   Hopefully in a week or so I'll be able to give the go ahead to a company in Wisconsin to print 200 Carty's!!   If we sell them we'd be able to give $1000 to help children find some clean water to drink.      

A new audience!!

Went to the Holland Home today to visit Lynn's mom who has advanced Alzheimer's.   We got to talking about the children's book that I had written  and I told them I had a couple more "rescue" stories in my head.  They wanted to know more and so I started talking about "Gumby".   This is a story about a wad of gum that some children, upon being told by their mom to get rid of that gum in their mouths,  put their pieces together and then stuck the large wad on back seat where mom couldn't see it.  I told them a bit more about the adventures of this wad of gum when I noticed that not only was Grandma and her friend listening to the story very intently but so were the ladies at the next table!!    Once again you just never know what a day will bring forth!!

An little setback.

As I get ready to take Carty 4 Clean Water to other Churches the printer (an office solutions store) tells me that he can do no better with the illustrations.   If I want a better copy I probably need to go to someone who focus more on book printing.  So back to the drawing board.   At present I have around 70 copies that I've made at home.   Guess I'll see what the response is at the school this week and in Colorado after that.   Would love to get this printing thing behind me so that I can spend more time talking to schools, churches & libraries concerning kids who need help with something as simple as clean water.  

Technical Problems

So it's back to the home printing for a while.   The company I had asked to make a 100 copies of Rescue Carty ended up making certain illustrations to dark.   Looks like it may take a week or two to clear this up and so in the mean time it's back to my little Kodak printer, paper cutter and binder:-))    At 5 copies a night I'll have a hundred by the time I leave for Colorado.

First Reading & Mom of the Week

Looking forward to my first public reading of Rescue Carty.    A private school in our community has asked me to come and read the book to the K through 2nd graders.   I'll have them for about 30 minutes in the gym.   Never done anything like this before so it should be interesting to see what God has up His sleeve.   The children will take home a handout that the school is making letting all the parents know that I was at the school and if they want a copy of the book they can buy one from the school office.   Very exciting!!

Mom of the week award goes to a young mother  who brought who 3 young boys into Dunkin for a treat!!    All was going well until she brought out the Orange Juice!!     First one cup went over the edge and as we were cleaning up another boy sent his over the edge.   STICKY JUICE and napkins mixed with munch-kins all over the floor.   To the moms credit she did not loose it.   No yelling, no scolding, no "how could you" comments.   She quietly cleaned up as best she could,  notified the people at Dunkin of the mess, got the gang together and gently guided them out the door.  Those 3 boys are fortunate to have such a wonderful Mom.

Just For Me??

Hard to know what the best part of this whole book writing experience has been but what a lady told me today was pretty awesome.   I had given a copy of my book to one of my customers who had two young boys.   They asked me to sign the book and so I included a brief note to the young boys.   When they saw the book and what I had written in it they asked if I had written the book just for them:-)))    awwwwwwww.....doesn't get much better than that.