Let's climb a tree!

Last fall I won the Minnesota SCBWI's mentorship award. My prize was a year under the wing of award winning children's book illustrator Carrie Hartman. http://www.carriehartman.com/ My mentorship will come to an end this month. My final act as the official mentee will be to hand over my sparkly tiara at this year's conference. Or maybe I have that confused with something else. But one thing is certain. I illustrated the theme for this year's conference, Confessions of a Children's Book Lover. I envisioned a young boy climbing a tree to hide out and read his favorite book. I had a little fun with the book that the boy is reading. My friend Nina illustrated her first published book this year. To find out more about the real book, Cedric and the Dragon visit http://www.ninacrittenden.blogspot.com/

For more info on this year's conference visit: http://www.minnesotascbwi.org/

Now for the fun part of this post. I added 3 videos of me and the hubb's tree climbing adventure at Hacienda Baru in Costa Rica. http://www.haciendabaru.com/ Some people manage to climb 120 feet to the top of a massive tree. But we weren't one of them! In the end we climbed around 50 feet. Dangled awhile and gave up with our tail between our legs. Turn up the volume to hear the loud jungle sounds. My sky diving blogging pal DJan will probably laugh at us. Right DJan?