Book! Book! Book!, written by Deborah Bruss and illustrated by Tiphanie Beeke, is one of a kind.  The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who find themselves bored when the children return to school.  Together, they march down the road until they happen upon the public library.  And after a series of communication problems – namely, the fact that the library cannot understand whinnies or moos – the librarian helps them find a few books.  No longer bored, the animals spend the rest of the day reading together on the farm.

One of a kind, right?

The story is simple and clever and is a wonderful way to introduce young children to the joys of reading and visiting the library, but I am particularly smitten with Beeke’s artwork.  The illustrations in Book! Book! Book! are not only vibrant, they are fun and lovely.  Honestly, they’re the sort of illustrations that I would hang up on my walls.

Pros: This book is nothing but pros.  There are books!  A library!  Animals!  Children!  And, best of all, READING!

Cons: None.

Borrow or Buy: Buy.

Reading Tip: I cannot say this enough: TAKE YOUR KID TO THE LIBRARY.  Go to story-time.  Fall in love with a book.  Have a good time.  If your child is reluctant, try asking them to illustrate or write about a trip to the library.  Or allow them to invite a friend to tag along.  Or grab a special snack on the way to share at home over new stories.

What to do: You can enter this giveaway by leaving a comment below or sending me an e-mail answering this question: how often do you go to the library?  All you need is an e-mail address.  The giveaway ends Sunday evening at 9 P.M. Pacific Time and the winners will be announced next Tuesday morning.  You can leave one entry every day, for a total of up to six entries.

For extra entries: This is on the honor system, so please be honest.  I will award you one extra entry if you vote for me at Top Baby Blogs by clicking here.  Each day you vote, I will award you one additional entry.  I am hoping to maintain or move into a spot in the top ten on both sites so that we can slowly begin to reach more parents about the joys and importance of reading with children.

To purchase this book: You can buy Book! Book! Book! through Amazon.com (that link uses my affiliate code) or locate a local retailer through Indie Bound.org.

An announcement: The winners of last week’s books were Jessica, Jennifer W, Lisa, and Anna J.  Keep your eyes out for e-mails, ladies!

Dreaming of beautiful things.

This weekend, we took Charlotte to visit a local poultry farm.  After learning alot and having a wonderful time, we came home with an enormous zucchini and the memory of the delight that danced in our daughter’s eyes when she first laid her deliciously chubby little fingers on a beautiful gold hen.

This weekend, we had family over for dinner.  We grilled the meal, then stayed up late telling tales and laughing and reading story-books to the children.  Twice a month, we host family dinners.  Every one is a little better, a little happier, a little easier, than the last.

This weekend, Charlotte turned a five-minute stroll to her grandparents’ house for breakfast into a twenty-minute trek.  After we arrived, the lot of us sat about the breakfast table making jokes and feeding fruit to the baby and slurping down half-frozen orange juice.

This weekend, Donald and I stood in our yard, talking about this and wondering about that.  Our daughter leaned against his chest, soaking up the sunshine, while we smiled and hoped and happily anticipated the future.  Come, I said as I started walking forward.  Come and dream with me.

This weekend was an ordinary weekend, the sort of weekend that other people might call boring.  But it all seemed rather perfect to me.

What did you do this weekend?

Dear Charlotte,

This last month with you has been outstanding!

When we first brought you home from the hospital, your Daddy and I could not believe the learning curve.  Our brains had never, NOT EVER, worked so hard as they did in those first three weeks.  With time, though, we adjusted.  I’m not positive that the learning curve ever really slows down…we just figured out how to keep up.

Until this last month, that is.  Let me tell you what: over the past four or five weeks, you have really upped the ante.  Sometimes I feel like I wake up to a brand new YOU every day.

DAT?!  Ma.  DAT?!

I think the madness all began when you learned the signs for OUTSIDE and NO.

As you grow older, you will find that your father and I are big believers in the outdoors.  We fell in love over rock climbing and backpacking, and we cannot wait to fill your childhood with long bike rides and beachside day hikes and trudging freeze-dried food through the mountains.  So the first time that you tugged my pants pocket and signed OUTSIDE, I was elated.  A friend of ours who happened to be over that day said I looked like a canary on Prozac.

The question is: HOW DOES SHE KNOW WHAT A CANARY ON PROZAC LOOKS LIKE?  Eh?  I’ll leave you to ponder that one.

Anyway, so you signed for OUTSIDE, and I was thrilled, and we went outside, and, WOW, talk about a new range of things to think about.  A month ago, I worried about electric outlets.  Now I worry about whether the spider you just ate is toxic.  Before, letting you wander meant you might hit up the play room on your own for a couple minutes.  Now it means that you might try to shove a rose thorn through your hand.

Charlotte, kiddo?  I know that this is probably where I should say that the outdoors is SO SCARY, because it is.  I was not sure what to do the first time you turned up with a bug bite the size of Russia and sometimes I cannot run fast enough to prevent you from, say, smacking your forehead on a rake.  But beneath all that scary stuff is something really wonderful.  I love spending time with you outside, I love that you try to put your shoes on yourself (you are constantly trying to dress yourself) and that sometimes you lose your mind with giddiness when I tell you that we’re headed to the park.  I love taking you from tree to tree so that you can smell the leaves and touch the bark and learn the difference between pecan and ash and walnut and, er, Momma-Doesn’t-Know-That-One-Baby.

There are an awful a lot of Momma-Doesn’t-Know-That-One-Baby trees around here.  And it’s great.  I love learning about this world with you, I love that you are awed by nature, and I love knowing that we are building the foundation for years of family activities in the great outdoors.

That other sign you learned?  The one for NO?  Yeah.  NOT AS FUN.  Nothing screams TODDLER like a child snapping their fingers NO! NO! NO! at every opportunity.

You are definitely a toddler, my love, and people seem to get a sick thrill out of pointing this out.  “She’s a toddler now,” they say.  Just in case I hadn’t noticed.  Then they follow that up with, “you’ll have to stop calling her a baby.”

Um, Charlotte?  Punkin-pie?  Sugar sweets?  Tickle dumpling love monkey cuddlebug?  YOU ARE MY BABY.  As soon as you decided to spend forty weeks hogging up my uterus, you gave up all rights in this regard.  If I decide to call you my baby when you are sixty years old, you better just suck it up and respond.  I am your mother and that is my prerogative.

Hey, Cynthia!  Recognize anything?!  =)

No matter what you are – baby or toddler, kid or adult, young or old – you are always my very heart, my very breath, my sun and my stars, my day and my night, my everything.  Your father and I love you more than words could ever say and we always will.  Sometimes I pick you up, shower you with kisses and exclaim I LOVE THIS GIRL! and it feels like I just cannot contain it, like there is love for you popping out of me in twelve directions at once.

But it’s true, sweetheart.  It’s true.

We love you more than bears love honey,
Momma and Daddy

A couple months ago, Charlotte suddenly developed depth perception and this entire family breathed an enormous sigh of relief.  For weeks, she had been crawling off the bed, head-butting the coffee table, sitting up on the edge of the couch, and nose-diving off her changing table.  And I had added “can effectively act as bubble wrap” to my impressive list of motherly accomplishments.

Oh?  What’s that you say?  My list is not that impressive?  You need an example?  One time, Charlotte crawled off the bed.  Our bed is effectively a mattress on the ground, so it’s a very short fall, but I managed to race fifteen feet across the room, slide on my knees, and catch her mid-fall, with her feet in the air and her head an inch from the ground.  It was a move right out of the superhero master handbook, I tell you.  And it was pretty damned impressive, if you ask me.

Of course, I also wound up with nearly a dozen splinters in one knee.  But that’s beside the point.  I’m sure Clark Kent had a few black eyes here and there, but you never caught wind of THAT little dirty secret, did you?

Anyway, one day Charlotte sat herself on the edge of the bed.  I was standing right there, with my once-besplintered knee against her back while I folded (and she unfolded) laundry, and in the blink of an eye, she catapulted herself backwards.  And landed flat on her back with a thud, the sort of thud that any mother will describe as sickening.

That’s right.  I could catch my kid after a fifteen foot dash, but not when I was standing with my knee in her back.

Fret not: Charlotte was just fine.  We had placed a foam mat all around the bed after her recent attempts to give me a heart attack in the hopes that if her noggin did hit the ground, her brain would not start oozing out of her ears.  She gave a startled yelp and spent the next two or three minutes nestling me for comfort, but she never even cried.  And her brain stayed exactly where it had been, THANK GOODNESS.

And the next day, she figured out depth perception.  We taught her how to crawl to the edge of something, look down (at this point, she always went “ooh” and looked puzzled), then turn her body around and slide off backwards so that her feet hit the floor first.  When she first began doing this, every time her toes touched the ground, she flashed us an enormous victory grin.

This morning, I realized that now it’s just another one of those things she does.  Like signing for more at the dinner table or catapulting her body across a patch of grass to give me kisses.  I watched her wriggle her way off the bed without even looking at me, looking only at the book on the floor that she wanted to grab, and I thought, you know what?  This whole motherhood thing?  Where you witness the blossoming of the most beautiful soul you have ever beheld?

BEST CHOICE I HAVE EVER MADE.

A few months back, I contacted Child’s Play International about promoting their sign language board books on this website.  You will see a collection of those books later this fall; today I want to draw your attention to a series of books that I had never heard of until they threw a couple in the box.

And then, I fell in love.

Okay, maybe not in love.  But certainly in very deep like.  I have four of the books from this series – the Just Like Us! or Just Like Me! series authored by Jess Stockham – now and I am always on the look-out for the rest.  Charlotte, on the other hand?  Charlotte is in love.

The book that we read most often is called Eating Well: Just Like Me! although Making Friends: Just Like Us! is a close second.  All of the books are short board books with only five spreads, and each spread contains a flap that opens up.  For example, the first page of Eating Well: Just Like Me! says “Mouse likes tasty oats.”  The image opposite the sentence shows a mouse nibbling on oats, and when you open the flap, there is a baby happily chowing down on some oatmeal.  Near the baby, there is a short quip: “Me too!”

My daughter is not ordinarily a big fan of books with flaps, but she cannot get enough of these.  She loves the baby faces in the books, she loves that they are doing the same things that she does, and she especially loves the vibrant colors of the illustrations.  They may be simple, but they are perfect for her.  I now keep at least one of these books in our diaper bag at all times because she loves them that much.

It borders on an obsession for her, really.

Pros:  Children love identifying with the animals and babies illustrated in the books.  All of the books are simple, which kids love, and are easy for adults to act out.  One book says, for example “Polar bears cuddle closely…just like us!” which is, ADMIT IT, a lot of fun to act out with a small child.  Of course, my small child happens to push me away every time we reach this page, WHAT IS WITH THAT?  I BIRTHED YOU, SMALL CHILD!  I PUSHED YOU OUT OF MY WOMB!  WHAT’S SO HARD ABOUT A LITTLE CUDDLING?!

Cons: None.

Borrow or Buy: I think it’s worth it to look into at least one or two of these books.  They really are quite fun for babies and toddlers.

Reading Tip: Why not give interactive books a whirl?  There are books that will ‘read’ to your child for you, books that make sounds when you press buttons, books that have pop-up illustrations and pull tabs and spin wheels and flaps you can open.  You might need to invest your life savings in Scotch tape if you have a young baby, and I still prefer plain story-books, but even I have to admit that nothing is sweeter than watching a toddler discover something new about books and reading.

What to do: You can enter this giveaway by leaving a comment below or sending me an e-mail answering this question: what is something that you have in common with an animal? (such as eating tasty oats, or cuddling closely, etc.)  BE CREATIVE!  Or funny.  Or both.  All you need is an e-mail address.  The giveaway ends Sunday evening at 9 P.M. Pacific Time and the winners will be announced next Tuesday morning.  You can leave one entry every day, for a total of up to six entries.

As I mentioned, we have four of these books and we love them all.  (I am currently eyeing number five…)  I also have one each of those four to give away, so there will be four winners.

To purchase this book: You can buy any of the books through Amazon.com by looking up the author Jess Stockham (that link uses my affiliate code) or locate a local retailer through Indie Bound.org.

An announcement: The winner of last week’s book giveaway (Gossie) was Sara.  Congratulations, Sara!  Also, YOU LIVE IN LOS ANGELES, WHAT?!

Obviously there are, like, a kazillion people in the general Los Angeles area who have children.  But I swear it astounds me every time I find one on the Internet.  It’s like, HOW DO I NOT KNOW YOU?  Even though, you know, I do not know the people who live even two blocks away from me.

Does that happen to other people?  No?  Just me?  OKAY THEN.