Take the Mummy and Run: The Riot Brothers Are on a Roll by Mary Amato
Orville and Wilbur Riot are two brothers who never stop. Never stop talking, stop joking, stop hatching plans. Whether it’s Pufferbelly Point Punt (popcorn table hockey) for breakfast or leading a lost mummy to the Egypt room at the museum, [...]

Well, today began with a full-body sidewalk sprawl on my morning run, but it ended up with a call telling me that I’m the runner-up for the SCBWI General Work-in-Progress grant! For MALCOLM AT MIDNIGHT!
Aside from being delighted overall, I’m encouraged that it was for this story. I’ve been describing it as a humorous middle grade [...]

Last week when I wrote about The Dunderheads, I forgot to link to some of the other online reviews. One of my favorites is by 100 Scope Notes. Yes, he created a “Toon Review”!
Once I got past my jealousy of not thinking of doing “Toon Reviews” first , I had to check out the [...]

Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom by Eric Wight
We now have a couple of Frankie Pickle fans here in our house! Frankie doesn’t see the point in cleaning his room–it’ll just get messy again. So when his mom finally agrees with him, he’s delighted. Only…things get really deep and dirty and smelly fast. [...]

Do you know what these are?

Colonel Mustard came across them on the shore of our lake right in front of our cabin. He thought they might be bones. They’re not. There were about 50 or so, scattered and curled around a shallow hole scooped out of the shore.

 That’s right; turtle eggs! At first, we were [...]

My mom’s a genius. (Most moms are—it just takes a while for us to realize it). Look what she made my kids for the lake.

Mr. E and the Critter Keeper
We’re calling it a “critter keeper.”
Some background: our cabin is very much a “cabin” and not a “cottage”. In other words, there’s no carpet, cutesy northwoods [...]

Colonel Mustard and I went for a canoe paddle around our bay. We landed on a sandbar to hike around. Aside from crunchy, empty snail shells, gobs of goose poop, and murky puddles full of jelly globs of eggs and squirming wrigglers, we came across lots and lots of…fish bits.

What do you think picked these [...]

“Mom, how much would you pay to go back and see the forts you made as a kid?”
Hmmm. How much, indeed.