• Age: 4 to 8
• Grade: p to 3

Over in the meadow there's a spring wedding, with the couple's 10 best friends to celebrate. What's next?

• A house!
• 9 diggers,
• 8 masons,
• 7 carpenters,
• 6 well diggers,
• 5 roofers,
• 4 plumbers,
• 3 electricians,
• 2 painters, and
• 1 inspector

show up with all their trucks and tools to build a new house. And when the couple and their friends have a house-warming party, a new baby comes, too!

Inspired by Olive A. Wadsworth's old counting poem, Shutta Crum's exhuberant rhyme celebrates the fun of counting, the excitement of building a house, and the satisfaction of sharing work.

Shutta Crum writes books for children and poetry for adults. She is also a storyteller, a lecturer and a librarian. Several of her articles about teaching and writing have appeared in professional journals. In 2005, she was honoured by being one of eight authors invited to the White House for the Easter Egg Roll.

Shutta Crum's profile page

Paige Billin-Frye studied illustration and design at Washington University in St. Louis. Before she started illustrating books she designed department store ads, illustrated posters and magazine covers, and painted greeting cards for Hallmark. Now Paige works from her home in a neighbourhood filled with kids in Washington, DC where she live with her husband, two sons, one cat, lots of fish and a garden filled with flowers.

Paige Billin-Frye's profile page

"Budding builders will avidly follow the arrival of each progressively smaller crew and the text's changing refrains. Billin-Frye's cut-paper illustrations create a strong sense of dimensionality, and she adds fun visual touches throughout, including actual copper pipes in the plumbing scene. The compositions take good advantage of the horizontal format, giving readers a sense of how a house both fills out its skeleton and takes shape on the greater landscape."
— Publishers Weekly

"The cut-paper pictures are attractive and clearly demonstrate each phase. ... the counting is fun and will give the audience a chance to chime in."
— Kirkus Reviews

"Attractive spreads of cut-paper collage carefully detail the process through the seasons, indoors and out, and end with a sunny scene, a picnic, to celebrate the completion of the home and the birth of the couple's son. Many ethnicities are represented, and men and women of various ages work together side by side. Women own businesses--painting, plumbing, and moving--and the electricians are 'John Bright & Daughters.'"
— School Library Journal

"Crum neatly fits descriptions of house building into the format of the song, covering everything from the masons who pour the foundation, to the roofers, the plumbers, and the electricians, and the illustrations are both cheerful and clever. Billin-Frye effectively uses crisply cut solid-color and patterned papers, overlapping them to give the pictures a three-dimensional look. This book works on many levels: as a creative counting book, a familiar sing-along, and an appealing introduction to building a house. It will also be great for reading aloud."
— Booklist