Beyonders launch party

There's something you might not know about us.  

...We really like reading.  

We don't do it very often (babies and jobs make it sorta hard) but we're big fans.  And we especially love it when we find a book (or series) fun enough to read aloud to each other.  This awesome method of entertaining ourselves has gotten us back and forth across the country several times, as well as merely given us enjoyment on a quiet weekday evening.  

One of our favorite authors to read is Brandon Mull.  We started out with his Fablehaven series on a recommendation from some friends (thanks, Landon and Kylie!!) and moved on to the next series he wrote soon after.  So when we found out he was having a launch party for the third and final book in his Beyonders series, we decided we had to go! 

(in case you're wondering, we're only capable of getting a good picture of half the family at any given time)

Brandon Mull is technically a children's author (although we feel his books can be enjoyed by all audiences) so the place was PACKED with hundreds of grade- and middle-school aged kids.  They had this awesome screen up with a countdown for the show and then switched it to this when the time was up! 

The kids cheered so loud it was kind of deafening...but also cool. 

They had a fun sketch with a bunch of other authors (Michael Vey, Christoper Paolini, Brandon Sanderson, etc) and ended by singing a song about being an author to the tune of the dwarves' song from the Hobbit--and that was when we became certain we were in excellent nerdy company :)

They had a fun show with some Divine Comedy alums and then geared up for the book signing.  We had brought our book anticipating getting it signed there...until we showed up and realized how many people were there! We looked at our place in line and calculated how long it would take to get ours signed if each person only took 2 minutes...and we were going to be in line for 3 hours! It was already 8 pm (Niko's bedtime) and our sweet boy was being pretty amiable still, but also looking preeetty tired:

so we decided we'll just catch him the next time he's in town instead! So in lieu of getting our book signed I just took this creeper shot of Brandon Mull signing books instead:

Anyways, even if we didn't get our book signed that night, it was still a very fun excursion and we look forward to meeting Brandon Mull soon so we can tell him how awesome his books are!