I've spent all morning getting ready for my very first author visit! Luckily, I have a familiar audience: Big J's 1st grade classroom where I volunteer every week. I'm counting on them to be forgiving but also to give me honest feedback. What was boring? What took too long? What was confusing?

I'm hoping to eventually earn money doing these visits. Next fall I will have a second book out, Mishka: An Adoption Tale, and it would be great if I could go around to schools talking about adoption and writing books and Russia.

So I've sat here, scanning and Powerpointing and freaking out because it's been quite a while since I taught a class, thinking about what exactly to say about adoption to this group of kids. My presentation is ACTUALLY supposed to be how a book gets made, but since my book is about adoption I feel like I need to at least acknowledge the fact. I am also wondering what will come up in the question and answer period after the big to-do.

What I've decided is just to be really general about what adoption is, but be fairly specific about our own family's situation. I'm not going into infertility or why we chose Russia or the ins and outs of the process, but I am going to talk about orphanages and what life was like for Little J before we came.

Here's what I'm saying about adoption:

Question: what is adoption?
Answer: Adoption is when a child is
born to one family, but then goes to live with another family.
Question: Why does adoption happen?
Answer: because the woman or family who gave birth to the child cannot take care of that child any more. The adoptive family wants to take care of the adopted child and make him or her part of their family.

What do you think? After that I talk about orphanages and Russia and then I launch into the fact that when I wrote When I Met You there weren't any books on the subject, and how I decided to write one. Then I will go on about illustrations, printing, blah blah blah, and I read the book.

I'll keep ya'll posted - tomorrow's the big day!