Barbara Ten Brink
| 1410 West 29th St., Austin, TX 79703 |
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Dr. Barbara ten Brink is a retired science educator. Now she has more time to pursue her other passions of painting, poetry, loving nature, and ranching. She bought a twenty-acre ranch in Gruene, Texas where she mends fences, hoes cactus, and manages cows. But the cows—the cows are the pièces de résistance. While .... more
Dr. Barbara ten Brink is a retired science educator. Now she has more time to pursue her other passions of painting, poetry, loving nature, and ranching. She bought a twenty-acre ranch in Gruene, Texas where she mends fences, hoes cactus, and manages cows. But the cows—the cows are the pièces de résistance. While tending her ranch, Dr. ten Brink began to imagine that these thousand-pound animals, with their big brown eyes and docile personalities, would be amusing if they were not so large. If they had all the personality of the cows on the ranch but weighed just eight pounds! And that’s how the idea for Eight Pound Cows children’s story was born.
Dr. Barbara ten Brink is as passionate with arts as she is with science. Her book, Eight Pound Cows, encourages her readers, young and old, to boost their imagination and entertain silly ideas about what they could do if they had big-eyed, docile, eight-pound cows for pets. Pets they could take on walks, give them baths, and train them to do new tricks. The book is designed with full-color artwork to coax the artist in each of her readers. She suggests, in the Author’s Notes, that readers write additional adventures in their own sequel to her book, illustrate the adventures readers would have with their own eight-pound cow pets, tell a story about the mischief their pets get into.