Yvonne Ng: Hi, my name is Yvonne Ng and I'm the author of They're Tearing Up Mulberry Street.

My son loved construction machines. They also were tearing up the main street down near our house, and my son and I would drive by it every day that we went to daycare, so I thought this might be a really good thing to write about. I had worked as an intern when I was in college for a civil engineering firm and I drew lots of drawings and did lots of calculations around creating roads or fixing roads, so it all came together as a topic.

I loved being able to take the technical terms that I had to type up when I would type proposals for the engineer and put them into rhyme, things like the word aggregate and the word soil and the word screed and so forth, so technical terms for people who knew about construction. Finding rhymes for them was really fun, but another thing I thought was really fun was that I read it to my son, my first draft, and he said, "That's very nice, Mom." I think he was two or three and he said, "But you made two mistakes. One was you forgot front loaders and the other was why are they tearing up Mulberry Street?" So I was really happy because he was correct. I forgot front loaders and I was able to actually introduce the engineer. I hadn't actually put the engineer into this story and so it was great that I could do that and it was all because he gave me that feedback.

I was hoping that when people read this book, first of all, children who loved construction machines would learn some of the actual terminology that was used around machines and the work that road construction engineers and construction workers do. I also was hoping that people reading it would realize that the road is not simple. It is actually designed as a layer cake design and the purpose of each material that goes into it and how they arrange the pipes and the utilities and the asphalt, there's a particular order to it.

I'll read the first few paragraphs and sections of They're Tearing Up Mulberry Street:

I was coming home from school, skipping happily, when a huge excavator rolled down the street towards me, but after enjoying this wonderful treat, I saw they were tearing up Mulberry Street. "This road needs help," a civil engineer told me. "Cracks grow into potholes, as you can clearly see. The sewer pipes are old, the water pipes have lead, and the street lights are dim," the engineer said. The jackhammer busted the concrete into rubble and broke up the road without any trouble. The operator maneuvered the excavator arm. I watched, behind the line, far away from harm. Then I ran super fast on my two little feet to tell Mom what was happening on Mulberry Street.