We seek the widest range of images we can find, so we start with the internet—where else! We think babies and toddlers appreciate good photography as much as the next person, and we looked at over 100,000 photographs to make each book, each of us selecting our favorite images while thinking of possible rhymes.

Once we have our two collections of ideas and images, we make hard copy prints of the digital photos (300 to 350 for each book), then meet to review them. These books might seem simple, but crafting them is like solving a puzzle. Each action photo pair needs a line of text that will rhyme (or half-rhyme) with another. Some photo pairs, as compelling as they might be, just can’t be summed up in a neatly fitting rhyme, and thus we must reluctantly abandon them. Others are easy rhymes but not visually compelling. Swap one rhyming pair for another, and the whole flow of the book changes.

A solid idea or a half-baked glimmer of an idea, we share it with each other. We brainstorm, label photos, re-label photos, move them around, come up with rhymes we like a lot and others not as much but write everything down, striving to establish the book’s structure. Two creative souls with opinions, there’s a lot of back and forth, give and take, ideas floating and bouncing and ricocheting all over the place. 

Over a few months’ work we have an assembly of photos and a text we think is terrific. But that’s just the beginning, as now we await feedback from our editor, knowing that more work may be ahead for us to make the book as good as it can be. It’s back to the drawing board—more photo searching, more rhyming, more rearranging. But we know that somehow we’ll get it.

And we do!

We hope babies and doggies and kitties and bunnies and grown-ups have as much fun reading our books as we had making them.