Coming up in the fall, we have ourselves signed up to give presentations at eight different colleges. This is very exciting, but also a little daunting. For the most part, we’re given an hour – the expectation seems to be we do a 45-minute talk with a 15-minute question and answer session at the end. 45 minutes seems like an awfully long time. We’ve made a tactical decision to try to keep folks from completely falling asleep by showing them lots of slides while we tell our story.

Here’s a little condensed version of it for you:

Matthew and I make stuff like crazy, pretty much all the time:

It’s nice to get to work in your pajamas:

Even though it sometimes means that you fall asleep at your desk, never having taken off your pajamas all day:

When we’re not working, Matthew generally is wrangling the kids:

And I spend a lot of time making sure our ice cream stores never run too low:

Though sometimes all of this crazy chaos that is our lives can feel tiring (especially the keeping tabs on the ice cream part), we feel like we’ve gotten more than our share of good luck:

And we love very much what we do, even if it sometimes makes us feel like we’re crazy:

That’s the basic idea, with some sage advice, creative rabble-rousing, and general dog-and-pony-show-ing thrown in. The slideshow that we’ll be taking on the road this fall has 266 slides in it. About 3/4 of those slides are slides I have to draw. This means that for the last very LONG time I have been drawing our heads into different scenarios. I have two files on my computer that pretty much stay on my desktop so I can look at all of our different expressions and try to make the best fit.

Sometimes none of the heads quite captures the expression I’m looking for, and I have to call Matthew over and say, “Look like you’re frustrated that Twitter only lets you use 140 characters”:

or, “Look pathetically hopeful that someday you will be allowed to ride a motorcycle”:

Luckily, Matthew has a strong background in theater and film that’s kept this project running smoothly. As it is, I’ve only got 18 drawings to go. Hopefully I can get them finished before our first presentation at Drake University in Iowa. I’ve got two and a half weeks – here’s hoping!