He guided us brilliantly. He entertained us with stories. He got to know us and ask questions about our family. He made the day simply perfect. We floated late in the I cannot stand getting water in my face even. I was as close to a major meltdown as This was the 2nd time that I did river rafting after having an amazing experience in West Virginia. Firstly we had asked for half day rafting while booking but did not get it and instead had to pay for full day rafting. First time ever white water rafting. Curtis was an amazing guide and gave us the full white water experience.
Would definitely do this again! Glad I got to see the Royal Gorge from this angle. From start to finish the AAE did a great job. Drew our guide was great in pointing things out for us during the trip. We had the whole raft to our self and we had a blast, even in the rain. Reid was the best guide our family had a blast!
Thank you American Adventure Expeditions we will see you soon! Tour was well organized and they made the adventure quite enjoyable. Would recommend this group anytime. Had a blast, Drew was an amazing guide and extremely knowledgeable. My wife and I loved the trip, the water was low so it was a more technical trip than normal. We are excited to come back and go on another trip. We had kids as young as 7 and parents as old as The age and ability levels weren't a problem at all. The guides Alan and Reid were great. Flights Restaurants Things to do.
All of your saved places can be found here in My Trips. Log in to get trip updates and message other travelers. Log in Join Recently viewed Bookings Inbox. American Adventure Expeditions, Buena Vista: For the Street-Legal cover record we did everything onscreen but submitted files to the masterer that had been printed on tape. I've not done it, but friends who have tell me that recording onto tape then digitizing to mix works nicely, and I believe it.
One offers transparent functionality, the other a singularly beautiful taste that, while you can cook good meals without it, there's no exact substitute for and perhaps never will be. As for vinyl, I've always felt that it's the best-sounding format, and that to get very worked-up over it is silly. CDs sound just fine. Anybody that can't bear CD sound quality is a big baby or a crazy person.
However, CDs are either fast-disappearing or gone I have so much trouble keeping up; the line between "disappearing" and "gone" is very thick for an old person , and so we're left with sound files and vinyl -- an efficient medium and a quality medium. These last two vinyl adventures of mine have been educational. The realm in which acetates are made, molded, and pressed is ablaze with quirks and interest.
Much of the interestingness is economically based. Most of the people making LPs are small-order boutique sellers like me, but it's the same plants handling our orders and those of the big-money players alike, so that our deadlines are apt to be distant and indeterminate. The market for vinyl as a whole isn't big enough that the record-issuer has very many competitors to choose from.
Cultural factors add some small coloration to the manufacture of LPs. The people that turn the digital files into lacquer masters are epicurean, white-robed, science-besotted savants. They answer to a master -- excuse me, a masterer -- who, like Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty , is pleased to personify royal standards in a setting ever-sliding into brainless lassitude. The people at the pressing plants, to stick doggedly with the analogy, are like Bligh's merry crew of shirtless savages. If you take issue with some feature of the lacquer reference, you may receive from the mastering lab a patient explanation, spiked with hard-to-avoid jargon, of why it is you're not really hearing what you think you hear; the equivalent conversation with the pressing-plant denizens will get you a meaty middle-finger salute.
Choose the pressing plant with like care though there's not much choice , and forget about having much say after that. From the hour the plant receives the acetate, your chief remaining resource is prayer. One of the surprising bits of knowledge I got on my first foray into vinyl manufacture was side length. The narrower the grooves need to be, the worse the record sounds. When I learned this, my mind went straight away to Abbey Road , each of whose sides is well over 20 minutes. But in support of the other point, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: I cite that one specifically because it's a quiet song at the close of an over-twenty-minute side.
Sound quality is harder to maintain as the circumference of the disc tightens "quality" as determined by things like lack of distortion and maximum low and high frequencies. The masterers suggest that you avoid closing a side with a quiet song. They also suggest you not end a side with a very loud song.
How do you like that? It would make a nice experiment to empty your shelves so that only the records you thought sounded best remained, then to separate out all the records that had soft ballads or clangorous epics as side-closers come to think of it, Abbey Road 's second side essentially had both, with "Her Majesty" as brief as it was , as well as all the records with sides longer than, say, 17 minutes.
Would you have any records left? After finishing the last mix on my present record, I thought that I might avoid this particular heartache of side-lengths and loud-and-soft. The cost of making a two-record package was tough for me to consider, since it practically ensured that I'd lose money on the release. I'll add up the times and see, I thought. If the total time is longer than 48 minutes, or 24 minutes per side, I'll think about editing 4 minutes off -- or losing the money and making the extra LP.
If it's 48 minutes, or a little under, I'll gird myself for some back-and-forth with the mastering man, and get out my little prayer-book. As it happened, the running time was 54 minutes, and I didn't have the heart to chop off 4 minutes of music -- that's so much! I committed to the extra LP and the expenditure. My kingdom for 4 minutes. Well, today's sweet pill took some edge off that bitter one. My record has a lot of quiet on it. I love quiet as an element in music more and more, by which I mean not only soft playing and low signal but no signal: Side one opens with a contemplative improvisation between me and Robbie Gjersoe.
Side two starts with a long song on which my Collings is the only non-vocal instrument, and along with that austerity, there are brief silences here and there in it, where I stop the strings and things just hover. The grooves are wide, the circumference too, and I can't tell you how happy it made me to hear the absence of sound in my headphones, midsong at a pretty loud volume. The last song, on side 4, is decidedly clangorous.
I detect no volume loss or quality reduction. We'll see what the other turntables say. Meant in a spirit of reflective gratitude, surely it came off as so much bragging. In that sentence -- its involutional length if not its emotional tone -- I salute Thomas Bernhard, whose Gathering Prizes helped make last August a lot funnier. Way too much fluffy contemporary reading. It has fictional stories, dense graphs, handmade illustrations, offhand autobiographical anecdote, and pages of equations and computer-science minutiae that I had to struggle with or skip altogether.
Peter the epigrammatical elitist and carpenter of durable phrases stained by a dark Calvinism, Max the wisecracking Jewish populist and master of streamlined ready-for-TV sentences. Close in age Shulman was born 9 years later than DeVries in and died 5 years sooner , both were permanently amused by sex, American middle-class mores, and adolescence.
Opiates, bizarrely unfit leaders, and reckless borrowing. On a professional plane, my year was studded with more braggable moments than any previous -- the Met in NYC, the Grammys, the Steppenwolf showcase of a musical-in-progress, my return to the Grand Ole Opry, and the Town Hall show in December with various SNL -ers, for example.
Yet here I was, sharing a bill with their latter-day counterparts, brilliant and funny people, and most of what occupied my mind was, so to speak, points of order. How long till my next spot? Was the tuning doing okay amid the offstage temperature shifts? What time was it? And so on and et cetera. Although I occasionally get flustered by performance environments that are outside my comfort zone, this represents my mental state at most performances: Keeping form, from here on out, is the focus, not making strides.
Likewise, chatting amiably with Vanessa Bayer was a pleasure, but dishing with the Uber driver en route back to Brooklyn was fun too. The aspect of the year that heated up my emotions the most was the musicians I had access to. Singing a verse of a song I made up and then throwing Matt Flinner a solo is a dream with which, as Wm F.
And here we are. I count dates on my routing sheet. It sure felt like more -- maybe it was the added travel days. I also did a handful of Hideout Monday night shows, a couple sit-in-with-friends dates, a charity fundraiser or two, and a little radio on non-performance days. Hawaii, which has been my 1 dream destination for years, was probably my favorite work outing. We were short a person on our canoe, but even with two of the five of us total novices -- me and a pretty young woman who shed progressively more clothing as the 90 minutes of aerobic labor wore on -- we won against 3 other more experienced boats.
Between strokes, we watched the sun coming up over the island. At the halfway stop, at the edge of a Tom Sawyer-like island, the men and the woman stood waist-deep in the water alongside their boats and chatted, some of them dropping broad hints about how much money they had earned on the mainland before retiring.
I did a music presentation for a public middle-school class, most of them natives. Our single point of intersection was Michael Jackson. Its population is almost 4 million but it has a non-corporate service economy that seemed to me like it would be unsustainable in a city four times as big. It takes 15 minutes to walk 5th Avenue in Brooklyn from 7th Street till it dead-ends on Flatbush.
- Prey No Longer.
- Cooper Collection 117 (South By Southeast);
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- Robbie's Big Adventures!.
By contrast, I spent 90 minutes walking through and beyond the Fitzroy section of Melbourne, and another 90 walking back along different streets, and the Park Slope hipster-commercial terrain stretched on and on, ramen dives and bookstores and rock clubs and coffeehouses and jeans and shoe stores. The next day, in a neighborhood 40 minutes distant, Shad and I walked for a half-hour after soundcheck, and it was the same thing. There were graffiti, sidewalk vendors, pretty year-old buildings, and happy young people on bikes racially homogeneous young people everywhere.
One was left puzzled as to where the hipsters were stealing money from to buy their body oils and other uplifting non-essentials. We played at a theater, a dance hall, and a festival situated on the bay, and were left with the impression that Melbourne has it all.
I had left my phone at the gate at Vancouver, and so I really felt unattached. My meal was sabich, a chickpea and potato dish, with a mixed mezze-plate appetizer. I had a lot of questions for Yael about the prep, the ingredients, and the history of the food, and I forget all of the answers.
I returned to Ima the next morning for breakfast before the flight to Sydney and brought Shad with me. Part of the fun of working from a book unavailable in the west is decoding the list of ingredients. I already had silverbeet and capsicums in my refrigerator, to my surprise. Visiting Sisters, Oregon for their annual folk festival and instructional camp will prove hard to forget.
The town is cute -- a little too cute, if you ask me, more like a replica of a Western town, a la Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles. On the third day, the promoter called off the rest of the event on the advice of certain lily-livered local health authorities. I spent the remainder of the cancelled event in a motor lodge, trying to work on lyric assignments from Logan Ledger, a dynamic young country singer, and Anat Cohen, the eminent clarinetist.
Neither of them was in any way breathing down my neck, but I wanted to get something done, if only to please them. I did get plenty of whiskey drinking and phone talking done, and, as the weekend rolled around, I rambled over to Bend to have an incredible meal at Ariana with my dear friends Frank and Sheri Cole. With each new installment in the wine flight over the 3-hour dinner, Kathy got a little more red-state. These seven days in September seemed never to end. On Sunday night, I checked out an intermittently engaging movie called Wind River in a cute theater on the edge of town.
On Monday I washed my clothes in a laundromat and read a book about the Warner brothers of Hollywood. It was September 11, , but it felt a little like September 12, , when I was also in Oregon and cut off from loved ones. Despite occasional contact with people, my feeling was of isolation and loneliness, which continued as I drove up to Portland to play a solo show. I went up to my little room above the bar after playing, poured a slug of whiskey, and sank into an intermittently engaging Philip Roth novel and an Edward G.
Now, about the whiffing. Anat Cohen had invited me to appear as her special guest and collaborator at the Logan Center on the south side of Chicago, where she and her ten-piece band were to unveil music from her style-straddling new record, Happy Song. I first met her at a wedding in , where she was playing in one room and I in another.
On break, I heard a pretty sound sailing on the air. Her arranger, Oded, threw me a couple tunes to try to put words to, at which I pretty much failed. Not much like the cool-encrusted, slangy, half-drunk, hamfisted loafers of the Americana scene! Apparently I forgot I was But that was nothing as compared to six weeks earlier, where I had the lowest performance point of my year, in a little town in the middle of New York state.
At a private party in a barn, with a few hundred middle-aged lollygagging in the dark and setting bonfires and gyrating savagely, nothing was clicking for me. And the sound was miserable, making us even worse than we were. The buyer was a great guy, full of cheer and hospitality, and he told me an inspiring tale about how his simple business idea had revitalized his struggling community, there two hours from Utica. Also I have to admit that the payout was good. But all I could think of, as the golf cart carried us across his acreage back to our rental van, was the distance I had come to sound so terrible.
When you degrade yourself in public and have only the consolation of a check, you can feel exactly as low as a whore. The second record is my next Bloodshot release, a duo record with Linda Gail Lewis. The patchiness invites you to fill in the holes in your imagination, or spin off into your own alternate arrangements, which is what I did. Those first two projects kept me writing at a strong clip throughout the year. My youngest son totaled the family car, got a 30 on his ACT, maintained a C- average at school, socialized heavily, and may or may not end up at one the west coast colleges we visited in the fall, leaving Donna and me free to sell this square-foot prison and move on into the next chapter of our lives.
My summary may be written from a luxurious loft in the sparkling city, or, who knows, a padded chamber provided free by the county. While I'll be absent from the hustings for most of the winter and into spring, just puttering around the house, shoveling snow, and fixing elegant lunches, I will have some limited exposure later this month for you, the public, to relish and savor. If you don't like wearing pussy-hats, supporting the ACLU is a practical gesture and a way of saying, in this polarized time, "I'm right here on this side.
The three of us are fondly remembered by pious locals as The Jesus Christ Trio, under which moniker we delivered classic hymns at the Hideout in years gone by. On the 29th it's off to Chambersburg, Penn. Why not "Centre," or "Theater"? Let's rub this lack of consistent adherence to huffy Anglophilic orthography right in management's faces!
And we finish on the 30th at that bastion of Washington, D. Americana, the Birchmere, with a final blast of the twangy klaxon. It presents wild anecdotes, told mainly by eyewitnesses, about the lives and misbehavior of classic country artists, in animated sequences that dramatize both the stories and the talkers. What might someone outside the fold make of it? Not since the early writings of Nick Tosches has such a skilled and sympathetic artist captured and communicated the peculiar attraction of hardcore country, its humility and humor, its heart-wrenching plain-spoken expressiveness, and above all, its usually hilarious and sometimes disturbing excesses.
I imagine the average consumer is welcome here. He seemed charmed and highly amused. To stand by that metaphor, the incredible content of the stories and the talent of the teller -- I mean Mr. Judge -- are what makes this show fly. Such a short cutaway effectively sacralizes the moment but avoids making one of those routine, unearned epiphanies in which TV comedies specialize. But most of the talking is done by close friends of the stars, by their hairdressers, by sidemen and road managers and cowriters and and codependents.
In fact, the sidemen predominate, and this is a canny move, because these are the people who see the wildest shenanigans the closest-up and who can balance their suffering in the situations they describe with a deep appreciation of the inborn musical abilities of the people causing them to suffer. Also, musicians as a breed have an advantage over prose writers and maybe even hairdressers: And when the subject is alive, which is often when the interest is highest, protecting feelings and personal earnings is a priority.
The pace is brisker, and the stories are shaped and supervised by a first-rate dramatist. As we know from listening to nutty old war veterans, tales grow ever more danger-laden and bullshit-packed with the passage of years. The participants would have been dumped into jail with no second thought, or maimed by Mother Nature, or shot by firing squad, rather than have gone on into old age enjoying esteemed careers as entertainers. But the intercutting, in which sentences within anecdotes are passed between separate interviewees, and details of anecdotes laid out by party A and commented on by a wholly-removed party B, does plant an insane seed of credence: Besides that, though, no silly boasts mar the series at all.
Wiping from animated to non-animated footage at key moments: Talking about it, the cartoon face of the manager emits a tear, at which point the animation gives way to the filmed face of the crying man.
Robbie Coltrane
The power of this moment is as vivid as it is indefinable. Another day and another great passed into the darkness. This one's from my corner of the world, so, Steely Dan people, here's your chance to have at me! Bill Friskics-Warren did the usual bang-up job in his obituary on Don Williams this morning, but he strikes a false note here:. His brand, which was startlingly developed with his first solo record "Come Early Morning," "Endless Sleep," "No Use Running," "Amanda," what a roster stood apart not only because of its soothing moral wholesomeness.
Where other country music of its era was, at one end, showily and densely orchestrated in the Atkins or Sherrill manner, or, at the other, apt to nod opportunistically at the guitar tones, kick drum weight, and machismo of contemporary rock a la Waylon or Paycheck, the sound Allen Reynolds and Garth Fundis achieved for Don was spare and as maximally reserved as commercial music can get. It turned the heat way down on the emotions, the image enhancements, the hot licks, the volume, and even the narrative drama.
It's so bold in its unexcitingness as to create a new category of fascination. Lloyd Green said that when he arrived at the studio to work on that first record, Reynolds and Fundis worked with the players to take away more and more from the playing. They kept at it for two weeks. The story may seem slightly too pat to credit, but no one could doubt listening to Don's music that his settings were fashioned with tremendous care, that they sounded like nothing else out there, and that these guys were bucking the trend.
The rhythm section groove is positively wild in its lack of pizazz. It's hard to find a more descriptive word than "white" for it. I suggested to some songwriters the other day they were all white, of course that they should consider aping the slang and cultural eccentricities of their own tribes, whatever they may be, rather than taking the easy and common path of mimicking black language and vocalizing. No one's likely to take that advice, since it means turning away from so much verbal invention and, really, so much of the best that American musical history offers.
It cuddles up in its pajamas, settles back in its Barcalounger, pats its little paunch, raises aloft its cutely stencilled ceramic cup of hot cocoa, and smiles serenely, "I believe in Mom and Dad, and I believe in you.
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Songs like these established Bob McDill's writerly voice in country. McDill's breakout, "Come Early Morning," made a good complement to Don's minimalistic aesthetic, because its lyric held back any sparkling details. One adjective less and the building collapses. I'd guess this was a conscious application of songwriter diction to production and vocal style, because old Bob had a lot more methods up his sleeve. Among the what-a-grumpy--old-man-am-I propositions that I audaciously offered my songwriting group the other day was: To this roll any number of Don's forty-five top hit songs can be added.
Not that self-crafted humility can't ever get cloying, or that the Don Williams show wasn't an "act," but given that it was presented so skillfully, and seemed so in tune with the natural personality of the singer, this music made itself globally felt, expressing some of the finest attributes and governed emotions to which all of us -- especially we men -- can aspire.
My friend Don Lewis was in a remote Ethiopian village when he happened to overhear two men arguing almost violently over whether a voice on a boombox was Don Williams's. But the connection goes wide and deep; I had a cab driver in Denver a few years ago who was Ethiopian and also so crazily fond of DW that he exulted for 15 minutes nonstop. I was walking the dog a couple weeks ago when the title popped into my head for some reason.
It's a beautiful and exquisitely sensitive American landscape, a picture of every boy's life in every small town, drawn by Norman Rockwell with Charles Whitman lurking behind the trees. For all that, though, parts of the melody escaped me. The contours I pretty much retained, but without a guiding instrument, I was led into some dead ends where I had clearly aimed too high or too low.
Once home I picked up a guitar and tried to tamp down the bumpy spots -- "And he used to lean upon me" and "Flying my bike," for instance. Couldn't nail it down, put the guitar away and forgot about it for awhile. Sometimes when I'm working on a song and hit a wall I sneak away from the notebook and do other things that are related to music and so in some way justified activities, but are really just time-killers delaying my return to the dreaded page. In fact that's why I'm writing on my blog now! Last month I was stuck while songwriting in a hotel room and I suddenly decided to chart "My Little Town" off of youtube.
The results are very interesting. The Nashville number system wasn't made for songs like this but I'll include it omitting compounds and altered bass roots for simplicity with the chord names below just to buttress a point. Here's the first 1: Hello, Berklee School of Fucking Music! First off, look at the numbers. The system presupposes a stable key center but nothing stays stable for more than several seconds here; calling C flat-7 when it's really -- briefly!
People like me who lean on numbers or at least have them somewhere in mind at all times while composing are thus at a disadvantage in some styles of writing; the system, too ingrained, can be a roadblock. And by the way, just how much modulating? The key center in "My Little Town" changes 6 times in its first 1: Since Barry Beckett's intro takes a little time, that sums to 7 key centers in 49 seconds. It has to be a record. One of the tricks I'm referring to is easy -- changing a major I to a minor that becomes the supertonic or ii of the new key formerly bVII, now I.
That's exemplified in the first mod: The other trick is extremely fantastic and not nearly as often used. This is modulating I to VI via the augmented-fifth over the first of the keys. We're in C at the "lean upon me" lyric. Now the G is added to the C to augment the 5th. At this point the chord is composed of three tones: Do you see the genius here? We are a hair's breadth away -- a half-step, which in western music is a hair -- from an E triad E, G , B. E serves as the V to the A, and voila, we're now in A. Making the E an E7 is only slightly less subtle, and the whole-step and half-step parallel shift are crazy-beautiful.
The above is less than half the song in length but is the section that delivers the point, and the point is -- where is the popular music of similar complexity and harmonic ambition these days? I resist these old-man outbursts and try to recognize them as a perspectival limitation, almost a neurological flaw As the above illustrates, the era from Revolver to punk music might have been if anything more harmonically adventurous than the Great American Songbook era. With Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson at the wheel, a lot of radio music in the late s started sounding less like rhythm changes and the blues and more like symphonies.
I really should get back to my writing now. More on "My Little Town" in a day or two. As usual any terminological clunkers or blind-spots in my reaches for a technically precise language are attributable to my complete lack of formal education, and I welcome corrections. Thanks to all who listened to the show tonight on the radio, and to all who suggested songs to play via Facebook and Twitter. I truly did not expect that volume of titles. I'm in bed now, post-show, thinking about the people I should have hobnobbed with and didn't: Tomorrow I'm writing songs with Logan Ledger and David Grier, and either writing the sequel to "Cocktails" with, or simply having cocktails with, Bill Anderson, it remains to be seen and I will fill you in shortly, keep tuned A quick reminder, as I'm on my way out the front door, that I'm off on my more-or-less annual southeast jaunt this week.
Since the southeast US is the historical wellspring of my music these occasional trips pull a little heavier on my heart -- and, ahem, a good turnout is especially heartening for those same sentimental reasons. After that, a little writing in Nashville, including a session with one of my favorite guitarists on the planet, David Grier.
David's writing vocal numbers for his next record and I couldn't be more thrilled to lend a hand, or see if I can at least. Then I'll be back home in about a week and in touch about whatever subject comes up next My brother was the first one, texting me the day before I left home, "Have fun with that sick band! Those were my thoughts exactly on hearing Doc and Merle Watson's sped-up version of "Black Mountain Rag" on their live record, or Tony Rice's solo on "Dawg's Bull" seven years later, or any of the four members of the reconstituted New Grass Revival in at the Bottom Line That was as clean and fast and thrillingly fresh as playing could be, back then.
Now, thirty-some years on, I had players of like prowess at my service, challenging my hands and mind and enacting my scripts. Along with our good-looking soundman, Pierce, we were: If you write songs I thought this to myself in the form of universal advice one day at the wheel of the van you should imagine that one day they'll be played by the most amazing players living, just to goad your creative powers and sense of quality control to the nth. As the changes in my songs went past during performance, especially on the older songs, I perceived them from the minds of those around me and thought, "Hmm.
The Hegelian idea of the self-aware consciousness among others, each calling itself by the same letter, "I," recurred during the week. But later I reflected that the comparison contained an offshoot which was a little illuminating. The awkward fact of having to appear naked before a hotly desired stranger is a contingency that is usually overlooked in the heat of pursuit.
My keen anticipation of the performances obscured the inescapable fact that I would be a member of the quintet myself. Away from the stage I would also be seeing things through their eyes: No one complained about this stuff. Nor am I bad at parking or planning. Nor, I hasten to add, and implore you to remember as I continue these tales, is prodigy playing the worthiest sort of playing!
I'm a conscious being, however, sometimes cripplingly so. It's Myrna Loy in your arms -- deliver the goods, meathead! Personally, I had mainly onstage ice. My soloing throughout the week was much more inhibited and clumsy than I had counted on from having exercised pretty rigorously for two weeks leading up to the dates.
Robbie's big adventures (Series) - Des Plaines Public Library
My hands had adequately limbered but my head threw me a little. Of the useful lessons to derive from this, "Be more secure in your own abilities" is probably least implementable, since I've been insecure for 54 years now -- and to some degree it's helped me to be that way.
I'm always on the lookout for stimulating new people to play with! When you're young, that goal is pretty cheap and easy. But I was more than happy to consider the cost not only a payment for a delightful experience but a kind of educational camp for myself, or weeklong lesson. I hadn't had a lesson in some time, and I knew I'd gain all sorts of invaluable nuggets: The simple things can get away from you.
When they do, or even when they don't, it's good to hear them stated aloud from the mouth of a wise musician. Gary and his partner, Amy, live in Bloomington, Minnesota, with their pets, including Sparky the dog. Adam Sward is a Minneapolis-based illustrator and tattooist. He also does graphic design, murals, live art, and some stand-up comedy now and again.
He currently lives and works in South Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his dog and an almost alarmingly large collection of misinformation. To set up an event, have Gary attend your event, or for any other marketing purposes, please contact:. Your browser does not support the video tag. Out September 16, Order Now from your favorite vendor! Look for the Nook Kids Book!