Guest blogger: Brooklyn baby books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Despite your protestations, your Newbery picks this time around did very well! Brown Girl Dreaming didn't take the top prize, but it was named a Newbery Honor Book, along with the marvelous El Deafo. You've got skills!

Our house has been a whirlwind of birthday celebrations and fevers for the last couple of weeks, and I've been feeling a little overwhelmed. Happily, our regular guest blogger and new mom Emily has some thoughts about several Brooklyn-themed baby books that have entered her life since the arrival of her daughter Alice. Here she is:

A realtor gave us a copy of Brooklyn Baby, by Lisa McKeon, which has quickly become one of my eight month old daughter Alice’s favorite board books. Both of us love illustrator Violet Lemay’s busy, happy streetscapes featuring familiar food carts and subway signs. I also love the silly local touches. “Brooklyn baby, now it’s time to go to sleep,” instructs the last page. High up in an apartment window, a little Brooklyn baby responds with a big “Fuhgeddaboudit!!” 


Alice is still too young for books she can’t eat, but when she can handle paper pages she has a lot of local options ahead of her. In Homer the Little Stray Cat by Pam Laskin, a scruffy street cat finds a home in the arms of a Brooklyn boy named Adam. Reluctant about having such a yowly new addition, Adam’s parents are won over by the ways Homer draws their shy son out. One of the more endearing aspects of this story is that Kirsi Tuomenan Hill’s illustrations present Adam’s interracial family without making them the center of the story. 


We discovered Mermaids on Parade at a public library sing-a-long when the author Melanie Hope Greenberg stopped in [Note: Mermaids is also a huge hit at our house, introduced to us by our guest blogger Denise] . With bright, pastel illustrations featuring all sorts of costumed characters, Greenberg tells the story of a young girl’s trip to the Mermaid parade amid lavish descriptions of Coney Island’s steamy summer electricity. 


It almost goes without saying that Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, by the inimitable Mo Willems, is a total gem. Against photographed backdrops of brownstone stoops, a bespectacled cartoon dad makes an alarming discovery during a trip to the laundromat with his daughter. This one is wonderful to read out loud, filled as it is with onomatopoeic kid language – “’Aggle flaggle klabble!’ said Trixie again” – and the flustered, outer-borough dad is completely recognizable. 

I suspect it will be fun for Alice to see her world of brownstone stoops and corner laundromats - a world that would have been unrecognizable to me as a suburban kid - reflected in the books she reads as she grows up.

Emily

I'm sure it will. More from our crazy house soon.

Love, Annie

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

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

More first books for babies

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I've been wanting to write about great first books, the ones I give most often as presents for new parents. As you mention, Goodnight Moon has played a major part in our parenting life, and is one of my all-time favorites.


Goodnight Moon

Starting when Eleanor was about 6 months old and we were trying to establish a bedtime routine, I stole a great idea from a mom in my new moms group. Each night, we'd read Goodnight Moon aloud as our last book, and then go around the room saying goodnight to everything: Goodnight books, Goodnight mobile, Goodnight light, Goodnight window. It's calming, and it also makes you aware of some of the weird things you have in your kid's room: Goodnight Teddy Roosevelt (Uncle Dudley's old framed bandanna), Goodnight 50 Foot Woman, Goodnight Buster Keaton (our framed movie posters). The routine faded after a while, but now that we've moved Isabel into Eleanor's room, we've started it up again.

Every night, after Eleanor's teeth are brushed and she's ready for bed, we pick up the board book and read it together to Isabel. Some nights, Eleanor says it aloud with us -- she pretty much has it memorized. Isabel slaps at the pages and tries to eat the book as we go. (The corner of the last page is worn away from Eleanor eating it three years ago.) Isabel loves the book, especially the color pages; she really stares at the pictures. How many times have I read this book aloud by now? Easily three hundred. But Margaret Wise Brown is brilliant, and I never get tired of it. There's something about the rhythm of each line.

We have at least three copies of Goodnight Moon, one the big hardcover with normal paper pages.


Goodnight Moon hardcover (not board)

I'm pretty sure the half-eaten copy we're using now was our second board book version. Do you remember the story about Michael trying to climb into the pictures of Goodnight Moon when he was maybe 1 1/2? I don't think I remember him doing it, but my mom has told us the story so many times I have an image of it in my head: Michael putting the book on the floor, then carefully stepping on the pages, then crying, so frustrated that he wasn't actually in the room. Clement Hurd was a genius too.

The other two I want to write about tonight were, of course, gifts from you. I Kissed the Baby, by Mary Murphy, is a nearly perfect book.


I Kissed the Baby

It's super-simple. On each page, one animal asks another animal if they've done something with the baby, and the other says yes: "'I sang to the baby. Did you sing to the baby?' 'Yes! I sang to the baby, and the baby sang to me!'" The drawings are high-contrast black and white, with a little splash of color on the edge of each page, and the baby, when it appears, bright yellow. It also allows you to do the things you're reading about ("I tickled the baby. Did you tickle the baby?") as you read. I've given this book as a new-baby gift several times, and my friend Tui recently emailed me that her mom has turned the text of the book into a song, and they sing it to their baby regularly. He, like every other baby I've seen interact with the book, adores it.

Then there is the joyful and loving "More More More," Said the Baby, by Vera B. Williams, another I've read aloud so many times that I know it by heart.


"More More More," Said the Baby: Three Love Stories

It contains three stories, each about a little kid being fondly chased by an adult: Little Guy and his daddy, who kisses his belly button; Little Pumpkin and grandma, who eats Little Pumpkin's toes; and Little Bird and her mama, who puts a sleepy Little Bird to bed. The three variations are rhythmic and affectionate, with each adult lighting up and calling the child, "Oh my best little baby." Every page is alive with color. The book is also unobtrusively diverse. Little Pumpkin (whose gender is never specified) is black, while grandma is apparently white and blonde. Little Bird and her mama might be Hispanic, might be Asian, and when Little Bird falls asleep, her mama makes her a bed out of the couch. Little Guy and his daddy are white, but his daddy is hanging out at home in shorts and flip-flops. There is total joy and love on each page.


And so many favorites I've left out! I will definitely be revisiting this theme.

Love, Annie