Not a fish. Not a cuddler.

I remember watching a cuttlefish at the New England Aquarium many years ago, mesmerized by that flowing skirt fin and it’s unique W shaped eye. They are so much more interesting than I even knew! If your students are looking for a deeper dive into this unique cephalopod, the video below is excellent (but a bit long). I also love that you could have a whole classroom draw and color these and get a real rainbow of variations!

If you subscribe to High Five Magazine, you can find my work in the February issue. Can you tell I had a lot of fun with all the construction vehicles and cute animals?

As promised last month, here is the detailed information on my February break collage workshop with Portsmouth Public Library. They did such a cute job with the flyer! You can register your kids here.

Another exciting program on the horizon is the Derry Author Fest on Saturday, April 5th at the Derry Public Library in NH. I’m very excited to be presenting a soup-to-nuts program on the picture book process for adults. The full day of programming includes several other talented NH authors. Learn more about the day here.

At the end of January, I had a CLiF-sponsored visit to Pleasant Street School in Laconia, NH. The whole school was so lovely and supportive. I really appreciated the work school librarian Kathleen Grenier did to prepare the students for my visit. So exciting to see a bulletin board full of Peanuts and Moes. I also met with hands-down the sweetest two preschool classrooms, and chatted with the art teacher about my drawing books - the kids did so great with the more challenging dragons (see below).

I also accomplished a long-overdue update to my website. I wanted to organize my portfolio differently and clean up my books page to showcase KING. I’ve been using Squarespace for many years and even though I was intimidated about making big changes, it ended up being easier than I expected! You also might notice that the printables page looks tidier - that took the longest and I wasn’t even planning on tackling it. Just don’t ask me what I am doing with the blog section…

Watching: Somebody Somewhere. I think I subconsciously avoided watching this show until I needed it the most? I know fans were devastated to lose the show, and now I understand why. It’s beautiful.

Listening to: Hollywood Crime Scene, Martha Stewart. This is one of my favorite podcasts. After several years of listening to the classic Hollywood crime stories, now I mostly listen to their Mini Episodes (pop new, chat). However, the multi-part series on Martha Stewart is exactly my jam. What is it about Martha?

Reading: Mr. Mercedes. I’ve been catching up on all the great Stephen King books I’ve missed out on since my teen years. I had already read Outsider and Holly so I decided it was time to start at the beginning of the Bill Hodges series. I enjoyed Holly much much more, but this was also a scary bit of fun. I read this as an audiobook, and the narrator was gruff but excellent.