The pointing years

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Thank you for the sense of perspective! We have so many other good books going on here at home that I'm sure you're right about the princess drek falling away. It's nice to be reminded that it's more often the good stuff that sticks.

I recently heard someone say that a better word for "toddler" would be "pointer," given the amount of pointing that kids do from around 15 months to 2 years, before full-blown language sets in. Will is firmly in the pointer phase. He points at dogs and pigeons and other babies on the street; he points to indicate the food he wants; he points and signs "more" when handing me a book to read to him. And he loves to point at pictures.

Specifically, Will has become a huge fan of pages of books with multiple pictures on them. He points at the items on the page, often the same two or three over and over, and I name them. Very satisfying. Sometimes we try it the other way: "Will, where's the dog?" Less accurate results, but still a lot of fun.

Our absolute favorite book to do this with is a board book I can't believe I haven't written about before: Penny Gentieu's Baby! Talk! We've had this one since Eleanor was a baby (did you give it to us? Probably.) and it's been a huge hit with all three kids. Most of the pages in the book contain a statement of a single baby concept: "Where are baby's toes?"; "How big is baby? So big!"; "Uh-oh!"; "Peek-a-boo! I see you!"; "Clap hands, baby! Patty-cake!" On the facing page, there are pictures of several babies illustrating the concept in different ways:

 (Jeff and I have always enjoyed the Zombie Baby at the top left of the "Uh-oh!" page.)

Will loves these pages. He reads "Uh-oh!" aloud, and plays peek-a-boo himself. But the page he turns to most often is the first page of the book:

*point* "Dog."
*point* "Spoon."
*point* "Cat."
*point* "Ball."
*point* "That's the dog again."
*point* "Spoon."

This is so consistently fascinating that I've started packing Baby! Talk! in the diaper bag every time we go out.

Luckily, children's book publishers seem to recognize the importance of the point-able illustration design. Every photo spread in Eating the Rainbow offers a similar opportunity:

While The Noisy Book presents only one illustration per page, the inside front and back covers show lots of little square images of the pictures and sounds contained in the book as a whole:

These are pages I used to skip over without thinking when reading the book aloud, but they're Will's favorite place to stop. And point. And point. And laugh. And point again. And keep me reading at his pace.

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