I had plenty of ideas on how the book should look. But Kayla had real IDEAS on how to bring it to life. From day one.

For example. I began by sending Kayla a storyboard I’d been working on. It was more or less just the rhymes, with a quick description of what I’d like to show the characters doing on each page. Only the pages where the girls were in their roles had images attached. And even those were just quick finds from google images. The rest was entirely still to be defined.

Take a look for yourselves:

This is exactly what I gave Kayla to work with…Along with this extraordinarily vague description of what was happening in each scene.

As you can see, originally I planned to simply have big images of the girls doing all their imaginative play. It wasn’t until Kayla and I got started emailing ideas back and forth, and reflecting on our own experiences, that we happened upon the concept of having imagination on the left page and reality on the right.

And considering that contrast of visuals went on to define the structure of our whole book, that was a pretty important and awesome discussion! It was exactly why I was looking for someone like Kayla to team-up with and our partnership has been a hit from pretty much day one.

When I saw those little helmet pigtails, I knew the book was in the best of hands

And when Kayla sent me this little sketch of Rochelle for the first time, with those irresistibly cute helmet bunches, I (and my wife) knew that every idea from here on was going to be a hit.

But that’s far from the only thing Kayla helped decide on. She had questions. So many question. (SHE REALLY ASKS A LOT OF QUESTIONS).
- What does each kid look like?
- How old are they?
- What about their dads?
- What about the dimensions of the book?
- What about the name?
- And many many more.

But it turns out, they were all great questions. And every time I answered one, I could tell we were getting closer and closer to making the right the book. And that I had picked the right partner. Truly, there is no such thing as a bad question, so never be afraid to ask!

Kayla hard at work!

The next few months were a whirlwind of exchanges. My inbox tells me we swapped 99 emails in one particular thread as Kayla began sending me concepts, sketches, color tests, and eventually full-page illustrations. And I responded with feedback, research, examples from other kids books, rapturous applause and plenty of these: