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Good news! My nonfiction picture book Flip, Float, Fly: Seeds on the Move received the Growing Good Kids - Excellence in Children’s Literature Award from the American Horticultural Society and the National Junior Master Gardener Program.Two weeks ago, I traveled to Cleveland to receive the award at the 2009 National Children & Youth Garden Symposium in Cleveland, Ohio. During the award ceremony

So in a couple of days is my dads birthday, and he asked for an illustration... he is an architect and likes art... so I decided to make something refering to buildings, but also with a more artsy feeling...

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We saw the Supersize Me guy, Morgan Spurlock, at a screening on Saturday for What Would Jesus Buy? [Full disclosure: I’ve always liked that bumper sticker that popped up the first years of the war: Who Would Jesus Bomb?] He produced it but didn’t appear in it.

Anyway, we walked right past Morgan in the lobby as he was stirring creamer into his coffee and telling someone about the detox diet his wife put him on. I offered to take my kid back to meet him, but the offer was declined.

The movie’s kind of all over the map. Over consumption, people who spend their way into huge credit card debts, some lady who has hundreds of outfits for her dog (one of the ugliest rat-like dogs you have ever seen), the evils of Wal-Mart and sweatshops. Most of it focused on the Reverend Billy, the alter ego of an activist and actor from New York. He casts demons out of credit cards and leads a red-robed choir in rewritten carols. He reminds people that Christmas isn't about giving heaps of stuff. But if Billy's a Christian, it's not obvious, so it didn't seem Christmas was about much of anything, except maybe buy less, and what you do buy should be made in America and purchased from a small shop.

The one thing the kid has taken away is about sweatshops, clothes made in Bangladesh by 13 year olds who work 19-hour days and fall asleep with their faces resting on their sewing machines. One worker who tried to start a union in Sri Lanka got his kneecaps broken.

What was kind of scary were all the people in the movie who had no trouble answering “What would Jesus buy?” X-box, Play Station, or a Wii seemed to be the universal answer.

There were only a couple of hundred people in the theatre, but last night we saw the movie, Mogan and Reverend Billy featured on both the local and the national news.