What does a writer give the people she loves for Valentine’s Day? I suppose the ideal gift would be a love letter. I chose the second best thing, a book.

This year I made books for Evan and Molly. Confession time. I was planning to give the kids these books for Christmas, but never got around to making them in December. Thus, they became Valentine’s Day gifts. My plan C was to put them in the Easter baskets, but that turned out not to be necessary.

People are always asking writers where they get their ideas from. I can’t speak for everyone, but I get many of my ideas from life experiences. I had previously made Evan a book about getting a haircut because he HATES getting his haircut. I hoped that reading a story about it would allay his fear. So far that hasn’t worked out. Evan still HATES to get his haircut, but while I was creating that book, I found lots of pictures of him wearing different hats. Thus, his new book is about hats. I wanted Molly’s to be different, and one day I noticed that she had a lot of shoes. Babies today don’t wear the white high-tops that we wore and that we made our kids wear, and Molly has a whole range of footwear from boots to sandals. Molly’s book is about shoes.

So given a broad theme like hats for Evan and shoes for Molly, I sat down with my photos to make two books. What I love about the creative process is that the books I end up with are never exactly the books that I intend to write. I start writing and one idea leads to another and then another, and when I’m finished I’m always surprised by what I’ve written. That’s what make writing so exciting and rewarding.

My grandkids got books for Valentine’s Day, each was a love letter from their Oma.