I came to science, art, and craft project writing, not through any special courses or degrees in college, but through our four children. In 1987 I got a job writing the Mudpies column for Seattle’s Child magazine.

The ages of the children at that time ranged from 2 to 8 years old, and they were my testing ground for every activity. The sheer number of them, and their ages, restricted my range (so many little pairs of hands and restless energy!) but in the end, it worked in my favor. Most of the ac tivities I wrote about were great fun, but very simple. They were so simple, in fact, that the projects required very little adult supervision. Through this, I discovered that the most successful art and science projects, the ones that children love, that live beyond the time it takes to create, were those that surrendered all stages of the activity to the child. The more I interfered or ‘helped,’ no matter how wonderful the end product, the less interested my children were in doing them. They scattered, refused to participate, sighed and snorted and declared the project boring! The column absorbed these tenets cast by our children. Process is everything.

The column evolved. Books were born. Mudpies sprang from a mother, not a professional, and that is where the heart and soul of my writing lies.