And Then There Was You…

"And Then There Was You…" is a story about everything. It was written and illustrated for my son about six months after he was born. One sleep-deprived night I nursed him in a rocking chair while pondering the design of his room. I had decorated the top half of the room with Maxfield Parrish-styled clouds and a layout of the summer constellations set in glow-in-the dark paint on the ceiling. I wanted this design to say: “the future is wide open” and “there is nowhere else to go but up.” The border of the room had wallpaper that was a replica of a Victorian time-chart of all of human history. Staring into my son’s eyes, I pondered all of the events that had to take place for all of his atoms to be aligned into his tiny form. That is when I decided to write and illustrate a children’s book that accidentally hit upon all of the major themes contained in “Big History.” The book is colorfully illustrated with photomontages that portray the Big Bang, the evolution of plants and animals, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event; all the way through the rise of humankind.