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

Searching for great gay-friendly picture books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Over the last few months, quite a number of my friends have welcomed new babies into their lives -- they seem to come in waves, like weddings did in my mid-twenties.  I found myself heading to my favorite independent bookstore multiple weekends in a row to buy a few first board books for each family.  As I did so, I found myself wondering, as I have in the past, about whether there are any really great children's books out there involving gay characters, especially families with gay or lesbian parents, that aren't purely Message Books.  You know the kind I mean: well-meaning, but didactic, more about Showing Gay People are Normal than about telling a story.

For pretty much any new baby, I gravitate towards the books I highlighted in my "brand-new babies" section of the Top 25 (well, 33) picture books list I wrote up a couple of months ago.  Several of these books depict animal characters rather than human ones, and a couple of them (Baby! Baby! and I Love Colors) have terrific photos of babies, but no adults at all.  But it's nice for kids to have books which reflect the families they have, and do so in natural, easy ways.

For white friends of mine who have just adopted an African-American baby, I included Vera B. Williams's fabulous "More, More, More," Said the Baby, in which the illustrations to the three brief stories show racial diversity unobtrusively, in the context of a beautifully-written celebration of chasing after and playing with your small child.

For my college roommate and her partner, welcoming their first child, one of my choices was Everywhere Babies, by Susan Meyers, illustrated by Marla Frazee.  Frazee's illustrations are the reason I like this book, and the reason you first recommended it to me.  In the packed pictures of babies being hugged, fed, rocked, and played with in various ways, there are depictions of a number of different kinds of families, including what appears to be an interracial lesbian couple passed out on a bed next to a sleeping baby in a cradle, and a few pairs of dads who might be couples themselves.  The text accompanying these pictures is general and rhythmic:

Every day, everywhere, babies are born --

fat babies, thin babies, small babies, tall babies, 

winter and spring babies, summer and fall babies.

...

Every day, everywhere, babies are fed --

by bottle, by breast, with cups and with spoons,

with milk, and then cereal, carrots, and prunes.

You get the idea.  It's fine, and scans well, but it doesn't cry out for multiple rereadings.  The pictures are inclusive, but the last whole family shown on the page celebrating the baby's first birthday is still white and hetero.  I'd like to find a book I love as much as the others on my list that depicts families which look more like the families my gay friends are now creating.

I've written before about Patricia Polacco's In Our Mothers' House, which tells the story of a lesbian couple and their three adopted kids, each of a different race (the eldest daughter narrates).  There are a lot of things to like about the book, as with pretty much anything Polacco writes, but it's not the book I'm looking for.

At the library today, I picked up the infamous Heather Has Two Mommies, Leslea Newman's oft-banned book which made so many headlines 15 and 20 years ago.  I'd never actually read it, but it's -- okay.  It's clearly an Issue Book, and while it shows a sweet, loving family made up of two moms and a daughter, it's also a little odd in the way it opens up the issue.  Heather goes to a playgroup for the first time, and realizes for the first time that all the other kids have daddies, and she doesn't.  She feels bad, and cries, and the teacher consoles her, and has all the kids draw pictures of their different families, so everyone can appreciate that all kinds of families provide love and support.  It is, of course, the most diverse preschool group EVER, so there's another girl with two daddies, and an adopted kid, and a kid with divorced parents, and multiple races represented.  Maybe still useful for getting across the Message, but odd in its implication that Heather would never have run across other families different from her own before going to playgroup, and that her moms would never have talked to her about their own family.

On the same shelf, I found the more recent A Tale of Two Mommies, by Vanita Oelschlager (spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with Dickens).  In this one, a little dark-skinned boy answers the questions of two other kids on the beach about which of his moms (here, "Momma" and "Mommy") takes on which responsibilities of parenting:

Which mom coaches your T-ball team?
Which mom's there when you've had a bad dream?


Mommy is the coach of my T-ball team. 
Both mommies are there when I've had a bad dream.

The mommies appear largely from the waist down, as two pairs of long white legs -- I think the facelessness is supposed to represent a child's-eye view, but I find it a little disconcerting.  Again, it's -- okay.

In doing a quick online search, I came across some good reviews for Leslea Newman's newer Mommy, Mama, and Me -- have you read it?  I'd love your suggestions on some of the newer stuff out there.  Our foray into gay YA generated a nice long list of options (which you can find here under "Gay and Gay-Friendly YA"); I'd love to do the same for picture books.


Love, Annie