Guest blogger: Reading to your newborn

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You wrote recently about the recent recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics that parents read aloud to their children starting in infancy (yay, pediatricians!). My good friend Emily, who last guest blogged for us about grown-up poetry for YA readers, has been thinking a lot about this idea:

Dear Annie,

One of the hardest things for me as a new mother has been establishing so many new routines – for waking up, going to sleep, even for making my own tea in the morning now that I’ve got an infant attached to my hip – so when the American Pediatric Association announced its recommendation that infants should be read to from birth, I was overwhelmed. I could barely find time to do the laundry and now I should be reading to a being that can’t focus her eyes?

Lucky for me and my one month old daughter Alice, many wonderful friends gave us board books to celebrate her arrival. In search of a new reading routine, I put a few of them next to the rocking chair where I most often nurse, and a few more next to the bouncy chair where she sits in the morning, and waited for the right moment.

My first attempt was Mary Murphy’s “I Kissed the Baby,” a book Annie herself gave to us, which I read to Alice at six thirty am as she sat in her bouncy chair and I sat next to her on the kitchen floor. (Long story.) It was a hit! Four week old Alice seemed to be staring at the high contrast pictures -- or was she just gazing at the stripes on her chair? -- and the sudden, sing-song rhythm of my voice appeared to please her. After a few weeks of talking awkwardly about all the random events of the day – “Now I’m putting the sheets in the dryer!” – it was lovely for me to have Murphy’s lilting, warm-hearted text to work with. I ended up reading the book twice, once for Alice, who immediately drifted into a nap, and a second time for myself.

A few days later, I read “Owl Babies” by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Patrick Benson to Alice as she lay on my lap in the rocking chair after nursing. In it, a mother owl leaves her three babies while foraging for food, only to return -- surprise! -- in the end. Unmoved by the drama of maternal absence and return, and only vaguely able to focus on the expressive, high contrast faces of the three baby owls, Alice once again fell fast asleep. I was so happy reading, though, that I continued on through Susan Meyers“Everywhere Babies,” illustrated by Marla Frazee, and cried the whole time at the simple, loving text and diverse, beautiful families in the illustrations. Reading to infants, it seems, is perhaps more moving to mothers than to their charges.

There are several strains of books that Alice isn’t ready for, for instance the highly visual “Good Night,Gorilla” by Peggy Rathmann or the “Touch and Feel” sequence (we were given “Touch and Feel Kitten” and "
Touch and Feel Dinosaur”) that includes interactive panels (“Touch my ROUGH pink tongue”) fitting for babies who, unlike Alice, have control over their hands. That said, the sonically oriented books were perfect. I was initially concerned when Alice began freaking out during Sandra Boynton’s “Moo, Baa, La La La!” but it turned out she just had to burp. Stomach calmed, she once again perked up at Boynton’s appealingly rhythmic barnyard nonsense. In a few months, she’ll no doubt begin to appreciate Boynton’s charming drawings as well.

All told, I can now see why the APA might have made such a recommendation. (My wife, I should say, remains highly skeptical.) Though Alice herself is still mostly indifferent to literature, as a parent I really enjoyed reading to her once I’d figured out when and where it might be possible. I can also see how a board book or two attached to an afternoon nursing session might evolve into reading in the rocking chair before bed in a few months. Most lovely of all, though, I found myself repeating some of the refrains from our books from time to time, especially Mary Murphy’s “Of course I kissed the baby, my own amazing baby.” Perhaps the APA knew what it was doing after all.

Love, Emily

As I've said many times in the last couple of months, Alice is a very lucky kid.

Love, Annie

Making joyful noise with babies

Dear Aunt Debbie,

In the swirl of finding the right books for Eleanor to read independently and for Isabel to stay happily engaged, I sometimes worry that Will gets short shrift. He's certainly surrounded by books: the bottom two shelves of the main bookcase in the living room are stocked with board books he can reach; the coffee table is always piled with books the girls are reading, which he opens at will; and his crib is next to an adult bookshelf -- this past week, I found him playing with  Roland Barthes' Elements of Semiology.

Back when Eleanor was a baby, Jeff and I read to her every night, picking a few board books we loved, always ending with Goodnight Moon. Our routine with Will is far less stable: I read to him when we're alone during the day, and sometimes in the afternoon with the girls, but bedtime reading is overtaken by Eleanor and Isabel, and it feels like time is always short. Here on the blog, I fall into the same pattern, writing much more often about books at the 7 and 4 year-old level, and not so much the newly-1-year-old.

But 1 is an awesome age to read to a kid! While Will is still a big fan of books with photographs of baby faces, he's now really getting into books full of sounds.

The prime book in this category is, of course, Sandra Boynton's Doggies: A Counting and Barking Book, which I wrote about when Isabel was a baby, and for which I have a deep and abiding love. So simple. So captivating. So endlessly entertaining.

Two other favorites from Eleanor's babyhood are coming back into heavy rotation now:

Cows in the Kitchen, by June Crebbin, is a rollicking version of "Skip to My Lou," repopulated with barnyard animals intent on taking over the farmhouse and wreaking havoc:

Cows in the kitchen, moo, moo, moo,
Cows in the kitchen, moo, moo, moo,
Cows in the kitchen, moo, moo, moo,
That's what we do, Tom Farmer!

The farmer in question is sleeping in a haystack, and comes running to shoo everyone out, but is so exhausted by the end that the animals sneak back in and jump on him quite joyfully. It's kind of like having a house full of kids, come to think of it....


Jamberry, by Bruce Degen, is a joyful set of berry-based rhymes, truly fun to read aloud. The illustrations depict a boy and a large friendly bear moving through a landscape filled with berries and other animals. The text riffs off of one berry name at a time: blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries. The blackberry rhyme may be my favorite:

Quickberry!
Quackberry!
Pick me a blackberry!

Trainberry
Trackberry
Clickety-clackberry

And then there's a new favorite which came as a gift from you: The Noisy Book, by Soledad Bravi. No narrative here, just more than 100 pages of things that make sounds:

The firecracker goes boom
The cars go brrmm brrmm
The drink goes glug glug
The monkey goes oo oo oo

And then there are a few cute ones:

This afternoon, Will let me read him the entire book. Noises are awesome.

Love, Annie

Colors!

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You make an awesome Miss Rumphius.  I can totally see Mary Poppins in your future, too.

Aside from reading a ton of college essays my students write, and writing a ton of college recommendations, I tend to allow the application process to be background noise in my classes.  My students are all so college-crazed at this time of year that I think allowing too much talk about it into the classroom would be unhealthy -- it sucks all the air right out.  So let's move on from the SAT question to a different level of learning.

Colors.  I remember when Eleanor was learning concepts that I was struck by the fact that colors didn't come to her earlier.  She got shapes first, and opposites, but color recognition lagged.  Isabel is the same way, perhaps even more so.  In recent weeks, she's started commenting on the colors of things, but she gets them wrong probably 95% of the time.  While she knows all the words for all the colors, she seems unable or uninterested in matching them up correctly.  We've recently started trying to reinforce the concept that color words refer to specific colors. We'll ask Isabel what color her blue bowl is, and she'll say, brightly, "Pink!" or "Green!"  (That is, until Eleanor whispers the right answer.)

So maybe she's color-blind?  Or maybe it's just time for us to put a few of our favorite color-related books into the rotation.

We've mentioned the wonderful I Love Colors before.  It's one of my top-favorite board books -- so totally joy-filled, especially on the last page:

I also really like the Colors section in Food for Thought:


Skewing a little more in-depth on the concepts, here are three of our favorites:

Blue Hat, Green Hat, by Sandra Boynton.  On each page, a series of animals wears items of clothing in different colors: "Blue Hat, Green Hat, Red Hat, Oops."  The "Oops" at the end of each page refers to the turkey, who puts on all her clothes wrong: she's standing in her hat, or wearing pants on her head, or sticking socks on her wings, all with this lovely, slightly cross-eyed smile as the other animals grow increasingly perturbed:


Blue Hat, Green Hat has a terrific rhythm to it.  Even before Eleanor was old enough to understand why the turkey wearing everything upside down was funny, she liked reading it. Once she got the joke, she found it hysterical.

You recently sent us Eric Carle's latest book, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse.  It is a huge hit.   The other Carle books we own are in board book format, but this one benefits hugely from the large-format pages.  It has few words, and joyful, bright, large paintings on each page.

The book begins with a painting of a child of indeterminate gender painting on a large canvas.  The text reads:

I am an artist

and I paint...

Each successive page is an animal the artist paints, all in unexpected colors: a blue horse, a red crocodile, a yellow cow, a black polar bear.  After a series of these great double-page spreads, the artist stands back from the canvas, paint on the floor, to say, "I am a good artist."


It's a simple, clear, exuberant book.  Carle credits Franz Marc, painter of the original blue horse, as his inspiration, and includes a reproduction of one of Marc's paintings at the end.  Isabel has started saying, "I am a good artist," a catchphrase I'm happy to encourage.


Finally, there is Mouse Paint, by Ellen Stoll Walsh.  This one is about color mixing. Three white mice live on a white sheet of paper, so the cat can't see them.  One day, they find three jars of paint in primary colors.  They climb into the jars, covering themselves, then dance in puddles of paint to make secondary colors: "Look!  Red feet in a blue puddle make purple!"  The paint makes them sticky, so the mice wash themselves off (in the cat's water bowl, natch) and paint on the paper in both primary and secondary colors.

I love the way the narrative allows you to encourage your child to guess what the two mixed colors will form, and the mice are quite appealing.  The one thing I wish this book had is a picture of the final painting: I imagine a Mondrian-like canvas, huge and blocky.  I want to know what the mice create.

I'm assuming this will all sink in someday....

Love, Annie

Summer approaches!

Dear Annie,

Thank you to Denise for her lovely list of summer books.   Now that she's started, I don't want to stop.  I'll add a few to the list.

The
Belly Button Book is a cheerful Sandra Boynton board book for little ones, explaining why hippos go to the beach:

BELLY BUTTON BEACH

Where Tons of Hippos Stand Around

In Bathing Suits Too Little

Because They Hope You Will Admire

The Button On Their Middle

How Will We Get to the Beach? by Brigitte Luciani tells the story of Roxanne who has a baby, a ball, a book, an umbrella and a turtle, all of which she wants to take to the beach.  She goes through a series of conveyances -- a bus, a bicycle, a skateboard, a kayak, and a hot-air balloon -- each of which can't fit one thing, and so is rejected.  The reader has to figure out which thing doesn't fit each time.  Eventually a solution appears and all is well.  It's quite delightful, and full of I-spy and counting elements.

And the wonderful Shirley Hughes, about whom we've written more than once, does a lovely series of summer stories in 
The Big Alfie Out of Doors Storybook.

It has four stories about being in the outdoors: playing in the back yard, camping out near the house (with a local farm pig wanting to join in), trying to get a lost sheep home, and the best of the bunch: a beach story called "Bonting."

Alfie creates a pet rock from a stone he finds.  His mother gamely makes Bonting a wardrobe, including a bathing suit.  So when the family goes to the beach, Bonting comes along.  The day at the beach is lovingly described, and when it's time to go home, Bonting is nowhere to be found.  All ends happily.  Parents: read at your own risk: just a couple of weeks ago, a customer told me about her own child's Bonting, whose clothing was a challenge to create.  It brought back memories of splicing together fashion for my own children's rocks.

We avoided taking them to the beach, though.

Love,

Deborah

New York

Dear Annie, 

I've just spent a wonderful day with you and your family, skipping through the Brooklyn drizzle, being goofy with Isabel, and reading  
Dodsworth in London with Eleanor.  It was an excellent reminder of the joys of repeated readings of the same book.

I'm here in New York for Book Expo America, the annual booksellers' convention.  There are some workshops on Monday, a breakfast on Tuesday where Kevin Henkes, Sarah Dessen, Katherine Paterson, and Brian Selznick are all going to speak, and then lots of time in the Javits Convention Center visiting booths set up by publishers large and small.  It's a fun event, not so much for specific work that gets done, but for feeling in touch with the whole world of books and the people who sell them.  For the first time this year, people from our other three stores are coming too -- I think that will be a good thing all around.

One of the booths I intend to visit is the one for Workman Publishing, who just did a nice thing for our store.  They publish about half of Sandra Boynton's delightful books.  A couple of weeks ago they wrote to tell us that Barstons Child's Play, our little chain of toy and book stores, was one of the top seven retailers in the country of their Boynton books in 2010.  They sent us a framed signed print by Sandra Boynton (a picture of which I would have posted here but the camera is having download problems) to thank us for the sales.  

This on top of the fact that we sold a grand total of a million dollars in books last year is making me feel pretty good.  And to add to that glow, Workman sent a list of the other six retailers.  It includes some of the best-known independent book stores in the country:

The Tattered Cover in Denver,  Powell's in Portland (yes, that Powell's), Book People in Austin, Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis (the only other children's-only retailer on the list), Anderson's in your Jeff's own hometown of Naperville, Illinois and, just to add something a little different, Deseret Books, the official book store chain of the Mormon Church. 

So I'm off to the convention feeling pretty chipper.  I leave you with some fun from Barnyard Dance!, which starts, "Stomp Your Feet!  Clap your Hands!/ Everybody ready for a barnyard dance!":

I'm spinning off to convention-land.  Will report back to you about it all on Wednesday.  It was great to see you.

Love,

Deborah

Birthday books and bedtime reading routines

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Oh, how I wish we could get you to open up a bookstore near us!  We're overdue for a DC and Child's Play visit.

Isabel turns one this coming weekend (I still can't quite believe it -- this year has gone so fast), and I've been putting away books to give her for her birthday.  In addition to the favorites I've mentioned before (Doggies and  Cat top the list), she is currently obsessed with another great Sandra Boynton book:  Moo, Baa, La La La!  She's big on animals and animal noises, and has started referring to most animals, including pigeons, by her dog noise ("Fwoof").

Our pre-bedtime reading ritual has gotten a little more complicated since Isabel started to be just as interested in books as she is in milk.  Eleanor, of course, wants us to read her nice long books.  But as soon as Isabel is done with her bottle, she squirms off my lap, finds one of her board books, picks it up and shoves it at me.  Often, one of us will read Doggies again for the umpteenth time while the other finishes Eleanor's current library book.  On nights when Jeff works late, however, I find myself doing double duty: pausing in the middle of a dramatic scene to direct a "Moo" or a "Woof" at a delighted Isabel.

I remember that your girls had an elaborate routine that involved each having her own book read by a parent, plus having a common book you all read together -- am I getting that right?  I'm starting to wonder how old my girls will have to be before we can all read the same book together and all get real enjoyment out of it.  Not to say that I'm not enjoying this stage, too.  I am.

Two books are hidden on my closet shelf right now.  Dog, of course, is a companion book to Cat.  Pretty sure that will be a hit.  The other is a recommendation from my dear friend Cyd: Maisy's Amazing Big Book of Words.  Cyd's oldest daughter, Rebekah, loved her copy to destruction and they had to get another for Rebekah's sister Ellie.

I'm not the biggest fan of the Maisy books in general.  Maisy herself is a fine character -- she's a mouse, and not too girly, and Lucy Cousins's paintings are bright and appealing.  I like the way she outlines everything in black, making it feel at once childlike and sturdy.  Truth is, though, they're kind of boring.  Maisy does things -- goes to the hospital, bakes gingerbread, makes Valentines, goes to preschool, celebrates pretty much any holiday you can think of -- and nothing very interesting happens, and everyone is fine.  Okay.  Eleanor really likes them, of course, but they are difficult to reread.

Maisy's Amazing Big Book of Words, however, is pretty awesome.  It capitalizes on what Cousins does best, in page after page of bold drawings and words, without being hampered by a plot.  Each 2-page spread has a picture of Maisy doing something on the left (playing the piano, driving a police car, watering plants), often with a lift-the-flap piece, and a series of illustrations of thematically-linked words on the right.  For "Rainy Days," the words are "frog, lightning, ducklings, umbrella, boots, worm, puddle, snail."  There's a page on dress-up, a page on fish in the sea, a page on noisy things, etc.  I'm looking forward to obsessive reading on the part of both girls.  Let's hope I'm right!

Love, Annie

Birth of a reader

Dear Aunt Debbie,

It was lovely to be away, especially for such a joyous occasion, but I'll admit it's nice to be back home.  We're in a period of happy transition -- I'm about to go back to teaching full-time, and the girls are going into full-time preschool and daycare.  So far, everyone seems to feel good about the changes.

One of the biggest and happiest changes in the last two weeks or so has been Isabel's intense new interest in books.  In her first ten months, she allowed us to read to her a little, and would often pick up books as toys, or try to chew on them, but she clearly had no real understanding of what a book was: that a certain book had the same pictures inside it every time, and would encourage her parents to make the same sounds.  It is such a delight to see her diving for books right now, going back to her favorites, clearly indicating that she wants me to read certain books over and over.

Some of Isabel's new favorites are books you and I have mentioned before: Cat, Doggies, I Love Colors, Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb.  She is really drawn to animals, particularly dogs; she seems to be trying very hard to say "Woof."  A great dog book which belongs in our discussion of wordless books (here and here) is Alexandra Day's Good Dog, Carl.  Isabel leans into and pores over the pages depicting the great friendly rottweiler "taking care of the baby" while mother is out shopping: helping the baby swim in the fish tank, fall down the laundry chute, bounce on the parents' bed, etc.  It's all about hiding bad behavior, of course, but it's such a gentle, funny depiction.  And of course, everything is cleaned up and put away before mom comes home.

The new love of books has even extended into the bath, where we repeatedly read two simple and excellent Sandra Boynton bath books: Bath Time! and Barnyard Bath.

They float, they rhyme, they encourage washing, and they make my little girl sit down in the tub, if only for a minute.

I'm looking forward to seeing where her attention goes next.

Love, Annie

From My Scanner...

Dear Annie,

Ah, Hippos Go Berserk. A big favorite in our house -- one of the first books we gave Eleanor, I think. One of the many wonderful things about that book is the center spread, which I can't resist posting here:



It took me many readings before I realized that all is a bit of an exaggeration.

Hippos got a second life when Lizzie picked it up as she was learning to read. This was the first book she ever read on her own. Mona also went back to the board books when she wanted to learn. For her, it was a now out-of-print series of tiny books by Helen Oxenbury called Baby Beginner Books, with one word per page. There were four of them, but the one I remember best was
I Touch. It makes sense that many board books can become early readers: very few words per page, simple, big type, cozily familiar.

I'm going to do a bit of a leap here, to something I discovered on the store shelves today. I was straightening up the new sibling shelf, and found myself sorting through several copies of
Best-Ever Big Brother. It's a nice little lift-the-flap, nothing outstandingly imaginative, but utilitarian: "I'm a big brother. My baby brother has to wear a diaper/But I can wear big-kid underpants," etc. It's more-or-less the usual mix of multi-cultural: one spread with black siblings, two with Asians, three with whites. The exception, of course, is the cover: one is much less likely to find a book containing a variety of races with an African-American cover.

Best-Ever Big Sister has a child on the cover who could be interpreted as non-white. I've always liked these books, and they sell at about the same rate as other sibling books for the same age.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered myself holding two copies of the Big Brother pictured above, and two copies of this:


The bar code number is the same. It's just that this is what turned up when I re-ordered. No one at the publisher, Penguin Books, told me this was happening -- it just happened. My cynical self suspects that the publisher thinks it will sell more with the blue-eyed blond. Sometimes -- not often, but on occasion -- white customers will say that they're rejecting a book for a young child because the children pictured aren't white. They phrase it as "I want to give the child images that look like him/her." I find this a disturbing thing, and different from buyers who are looking for books with characters who resemble non-white children they are buying the books for. There's a much wider variety of races in books than in previous decades, but there are still a lot more books with white kids in them, or with white kids as the majority of kids. It seems reasonable to want to get more non-white images in the hands of non-white kids because there are already so many white images around. And it seems like a good idea to give everyone pictures of the world that reflect the variety of people in it.

So am I sounding like someone from a previous generation? Do you think about race when looking for books for your kids? Or is there enough variety around that you don't feel a need to be conscious of looking for it? This is a question for you, Annie, but also for any of those other parents of little ones out there.

Love,

Deborah

The great silliness of Sandra Boynton

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I don't think you're taking the window/mirror thing too far -- and I love your assessments of Lizzie and Mona's reading habits. I'm looking forward to seeing what Eleanor and Isabel gravitate towards as they get older.

This morning, everyone woke up too early and we ran out of milk and there was some general grumpiness (mostly from me), and then Eleanor completely lifted the mood by putting on a CD she's been listening to a lot these days: Sandra Boynton's Philadelphia Chickens (a collaboration with composer Michael Ford).


Philadelphia Chickens

It comes with an accompanying book, with fabulous Boynton drawings and the lyrics and music to all the songs, and I've had it stuck in my head all day. Patti LuPone singing "I Like to Fuss"; Laura Linney singing "Please Can I Keep It," about a big animal that follows a kid home; Kevin Kline singing a patter song about being really busy -- it goes on and on in great goofy, catchy style, with an all-star cast. (If you're a fan of The Belly Button Book or Snuggle Puppy, this album gives you handy tunes for the songs in each. And "Snuggle Puppy" is sung by Eric Stoltz. Sigh.)

Boynton is so unabashedly silly, and so prolific, that I figure most parents have at least some of her books, but I thought I'd mention a couple of our favorites, both of which involve counting:


Doggies: A Counting and Barking Book

Doggies is one of the first books we read to Eleanor regularly. On each page, a new dog is counted, and barks an appropriate number of times (1=Woof! 2=Yap yap! 3=nnn...nnn...nnn, etc.). On the page for number 9, all the dogs howl -- this used to send Eleanor into paroxysms of laughter. We're now all reading it together to Isabel, who seems intrigued.


Hippos Go Berserk!

Boynton's hippos have this manic look in their eyes when they're running to a party -- a party that grows and grows as the book goes on, first adding hippos, then subtracting them, and in the middle having a giant dance party (we always make the book dance at this point, and sing a little tune). This one also begins to get at the concept of addition: we recently had a conversation with Eleanor about how many hippos there are at the party, sparked by the last line of the book ("One hippo, alone once more/Misses the other forty-four.").

There are so many other great Boynton books. And, I'm sure, other great counting/numbers books. What would you recommend on either front?

Love, Annie