Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Running a little behind here... Blog Hop Question: What is your favorite holiday memory? (This includes Hanukkah, Kwanza, Yule/Winter Solstice, Christmas, etc.) My Memory: I have a lot of good holiday memories. I admit I love Christmas, from opening stocking in our jammies to big family dinners (and pie! I like pie!). A couple of favorite memories stand out in my mind, though. When I was about 5, my mom got creative on a budget. She sewed each of the three of us a patchwork snake (thus thriftily using up scraps of fabric, some furry, some not) and put it in our Christmas stockings. The kicker? Those snakes were 6' long! We know that, because my middle brother got a tape measure in his stocking as well, so of course we measured them. Mom stuffed the snakes using cut-up scraps of fabric, and I remember that she was sitting around snipping the scraps into little pieces, and I got worried that she was wasting good fabric! She just gave that mysterious mom look and said she thought she...

Today we're helping promote Elaine Kaye's new picture book by participating in the Dr. Mom blog hop! DOCTOR MOM BLOG HOP PROMPT: Share a favorite memory you have of your mom. Or just share a picture of your mom that you cherish. Or you can do both! Hey, this is harder than it looks. My mom is 89. I'm... uh, not 20 anymore (notice she's old enough to brag about her age. I'm young enough be trying to forget). That's a lot of amazing memories! I'm tempted to share the wonderful little book I wrote about my mom when I was in the 1st grade or thereabouts, but I don't want to distract from Ms. Kaye's adorable book, so I'll do that another time. Instead, let me tell you about a favorite family photo (sadly, it seems to have been lost). This was back in the days when cameras not only used film, but if you didn't advance the film yourself, you could take two pictures on top of each other. One of Dad's favorite possessions was our bright red, 17...

This isn't so much a review as a shout-out for all the fans of Seuss's wilder stories. I found the book at my library. Title:  Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories Author: Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel); introduction by Charles D. Cohen Publisher: Random House, 2014 Source: Library This volume contains 4 rather brief stories and an interesting introduction to them. The stories were published in magazines in the early 1950s, and for various reason just never got collected before. The stories are: Horton and the Kwuggerbug (featuring Horton of Hatches the Egg and Hears a Who fame) Marco Comes Late (featuring the lead character from And to think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street) How Officer Pat Saved the Whole Town (I think it's still Mulberry Street) and The Hoobub and the Grinch (featuring an early version of the Grinch, who doesn't look much like the one who stole Christmas, and is really a send-up of the advertising business, where Geisel made his living for a...