A few more adoption titles

Dear Aunt Debbie,

It's funny that you wrote about adoption-appropriate baby books on Wednesday -- that very morning, my friend Jonathan was talking about the search for a baby book for his adopted daughter.  There must be something in the air....

After guest blogging for us last week on Ethiopian children's books, my friend Jean checked in with the adoption listserves she's on, and has passed along a few more recommended titles:

Whoever You Are, by the excellent Mem Fox, is not directly an adoption book, but focuses on the ways in which all children share a common humanity: "Little one, whoever you are, wherever you are, there are little ones just like you all over the world.''  It's full of richly-colored pictures of children of all races and cultures, and the message seems similar to Fox's Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, one of our favorites.


God Found Us You, by Lisa Tawn Bergren, is directly about adoption -- in this case, a mother and baby fox -- and, as the title indicates, comes with a strong religious viewpoint.  The text is largely a conversation, with Little Fox asking Mama Fox to retell the story of "the day I came home."  In the comments I've found on the book, there's a split between adoptive parents who find the book's message loving and reassuring, and those who feel like it puts too much emphasis on how depressed the mother fox was before Little Fox came.


I Love You Like Crazy Cakes, by Rose Lewis, is the first-person story of a single mother who travels to China to adopt her daughter, and is based on Lewis's own experience.  It seems particularly applicable to families adopting internationally, and the illustrations are warm and loving (by Jane Dyer, who also illustrated Mem Fox's Time for Bed).



On the distinctly documentary-feeling side, there are the books When You Were Born in Vietnam,When You Were Born in China, and When You Were Born in Korea, each filled with cultural information and a lot of photographs of orphanages and adopting families.  A good resource for international Asian adoptions.

Finally, Jean pointed me to this blog, The Wayfarer, which has a list of books for both parents and children about adoption, specifically adoption from Ethiopia, and largely with a Christian focus.

I'm excited for Thanksgiving, and looking forward to seeing you then!

Love, Annie

P.S. Happy 500th blog post on Annie and Aunt!

Mem Fox, in bedtime and playtime mode

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I love knowing that Max and Ruby were real kids.  I wonder how they feel about the drekky TV show using their names....

You mentioned a few great Mem Fox titles; tonight I'd like to sing the praises of two of them, both of which have been staples in our house for quite some time.

Time For Bed, illustrated by Jane Dyer, is one of our favorite bedtime books: a gentle, lyrical rhyme which says goodnight to all kinds of small animals: "It's time for bed, little mouse, little mouse.  Darkness is falling all over the house....It's time to sleep, little bird, little bird.  So close your eyes, not another word."  The version I've linked to is a lap-sized board book (who knew there was such a thing!), and thus perfect for really little kids who are apt to tear normal pages, but love the large, double-spread pictures of parent and child animals.  I'm pretty sure I could recite this entire book from memory.  There's also a small-sized board book and a standard paper page hardcover, whose major benefit is that it contains an extra painting of a bear and the night sky.  We have all three versions.

Time for Bed was my introduction to Mem Fox, and was one of the reasons I perked right up a year and a half or so ago when I saw you'd sent us
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.  The other reason, of course, is that it's illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, whom I adore.  It's a lovely multicultural book, listing and depicting a lot of different kinds of babies, each of whom, "as everyone knows/ had ten little fingers/ and ten little toes."  Sometimes the text gives a hint to the babies' races ("There was one little baby who was born on the ice/ and another in a tent, who was just as nice"), but more often, the babies are just happily and quietly different colors and ethnicities.  It's quite joyful.

In birthday news, both Dog and Maisy's Amazing Big Book of Words were giant hits.  Isabel is now obsessed with Dog (which, brilliantly, has a pull-tab that makes a dog's leg lift and shows him peeing), and Eleanor and her friend Martin were super into Maisy yesterday.  Here's what we looked like for much of the party (joined here by Eleanor's dear friend Ian):

Love, Annie

Book festivities

Dear Annie,

Happy first birthday to the delightful Isabel.  I hope you've been having a special day.

I had quite a lovely day yesterday down at the National Book Festival on the Mall here in D.C.  It's basically a series of readings in the heat under huge tents by lots of different authors, each presenting every 45 minutes or so.  Laura Bush is credited with starting the festival ten years ago, "the best legacy of the Bush Administration," said Rosemary Wells, in a not-so-subtle dig.

 Rosemary Wells, best known as the author of the Max and Ruby books, ran a real pep rally for reading.  "I write to cause children to look at a book and open those pages and love what's inside....I don't want to write a book about what you should or shouldn't think."  She talked about the ability to read being the foundation of a democracy -- lots of good stuff that I agree with.

She eventually got around to good old Max and Ruby, though.  One kid asked her how she came up with them.  She replied that they're non-fiction, based entirely on her two children.  She wrote the first book when Ruby was five years old and Max was nine months.  "Ruby is 37 years old now, the mother of three, and still really bossy.  An Max is 32 and teaches horticulture at Cornell and still really dirty."

Judith Viorst, best known for Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, read from her new and wacky
Lulu and the Brontosaurus. I'm quite fond of that one -- lots of opportunity for parents to ham up a read-aloud.  (It might show up at your house in my Christmas box.)  She says the idea was born on a rainy day on vacation with two of her grandsons.  They demanded that she make up stories for them over the course of several hours, and eventually Lulu and the brontosaurus appeared.  Someone in the audience asked about Alexander, the subject of several of her books, at which point she said, "Alexander's going to kill me for this," and pointed to a forty-something man in the front row with a small boy in his lap.  He smiled and waved at the crowd.

Mem Fox, author of some wonderful books for little ones --  most notably Time for Bed, Where is the Green Sheep?, and my current favorite,
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes -- spoke about her childhood. Born in Australia, she grew up in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), the child of missionaries and the only non-African child in her school.  Her classroom, she said, was a space under a tree.  The teacher would trace the letters of the alphabet in the air and the children wrote them with their fingers in the dirt under the tree.  Eventually they graduated to slates, which had the attraction of needing to be spat upon to be erased.  She spoke about the intense thought that goes into creating the economy of language in her board books.

I'm going to save for my next post a wonderful presentation by a great graphic novelist. 

Love,

Deborah