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

Baby Reading

Dear Annie,

Someone came into the store today looking for three books for immediate use by newborns -- a frequent question in my book department. I offered my favorite book for little ones:
I Love Colors. It's a board book with full-page photographs of babies' faces, each with a solid-color page facing it. The pictures are pretty straightforward, but the addition of various props -- "red bow," "purple sunglasses," "yellow boa" -- give it a lovely whimsical edge. Really good for little babies. Faces they can focus on, bright colors in contrast. And the babies are a variety of ethnicities, which is refreshing. He took that and Whats on my Head?
And the third baby ended up with a high-contrast black-and-white Look Look!

Years ago, I was showing I Love Colors to a mom with a 2 month-old strapped onto her chest, facing out. As I turned the pages, first one baby foot twitched, then the other, then both legs, and eventually all four limbs. It was delightful: little baby totally engaged in book.

What were the first books Eleanor focused on? I know you did the Goodnight Moon bedtime routine (I defer to you to describe that one), but what other ways did she start on books? And Isabel (now 8 months old) -- what does she think of books? We have some form of family lore that my grandfather, Grandma Helen's dad, would hold your infant mother on his lap and read her whatever he was reading, usually the newspaper (have I heard this story with the phone book substituted in here?). This was considered cute and funny and indicative of his charming personality, but it's also something I think is central to raising a reader. Making reading part of a cozy happy interaction (baby snuggled on Grandpa's lap, listening to soothing voice) is sending the message that reading time is happy time.

Wishing you many happy times,

Deborah

Books in this post:


I Love Colors

What's on my Head?

Look Look!

Classic starter chapter books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Mr. Popper's Penguins! I have fond and foggy memories of that one. Will put it on my library list ASAP.

Reading about the Stuart Little problem reminded me that I wanted to write about Peter Pan. Eleanor got interested in the story through a perfectly awful Disney book we found among a host of other awful Disney books in our little local socialist coffee shop. (Great kids' area, super-left-leaning politics; I'm sure they have no idea that they're hooking my kid on capitalist culture.) She was, of course, fascinated, and I started thinking about ways to get her the real story. I looked back at the original J.M. Barrie book and realized immediately that it wouldn't hold her attention.


Peter Pan (Classic Starts)

What I found, after a little digging, was the Classic Starts version, which is a thoughtful, well-abridged retelling that captures the spirit of the original but is appropriate for younger kids. I don't know whether the other Classic Starts books are as good, but this one held Eleanor's attention for a first read-through that took a few days, and she's picked it up several times since and asked for specific bits of the story. Like the Wizard of Ozwhich we keep linking to, it's an abridgment I can get behind.

Another big hit in our house these days is the original Winnie the Pooh. We've been reading A.A. Milne's poetry to Eleanor for quite some time: When We Were Very Young is a fabulous collection, filled with lots of nonsense and infectious rhythm and rhyme.


When We Were Very Young

Eleanor's favorites include "Disobedience" ("James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, Took great care of his Mother, though he was only three.") and "Lines and Squares," about cleverly avoiding the bears that will get you if you step on any lines on the sidewalk. My heart will always go to "The King's Breakfast," in which the king "only wants a little bit of butter for his bread." (Now I want to go grab the book off the shelf and read them all.)


Winnie the Pooh

Winnie the Pooh has stories of the right length for a little kid, and all the animals are oddly crotchety and absent-minded and fun to read. I think it will get better with time, too -- Eleanor is just at the beginning of getting it. And of course Pooh sings all the time, and makes up little rhymes. It's nice to come back to an old favorite that has been overcommercialized and realize that the original is a good and gentle thing.

Love, Annie

More on starter chapter books

Dear Annie,

I'm so fond of the books you list. I agree with Eleanor that the baby-sitter story is the best in Busybody Nora. My favorite part, though, is when both moms realize what happened, and they start to cry. In a funny sort of way. There is however, one important warning to parents about the Riverside Kids books. Nora and Mrs. Mind-Your-Own-Business (to which I am not adding a link to buy) should be avoided. One of the chapters is a major spoiler about the tooth fairy. I discovered this while in the process of reading it aloud. I recommend avoiding that experience.

Margaret posted a lovely comment on your yesterday (5/3) post, which makes me want to do a mini-essay on the transition to chapter books for any parents of 3-4-5 year olds out there. (Let me just mention that Eleanor is a bit ahead of the pack in liking chapter books as much as she does at age 3. Many kids aren't interested in the longer stories until 4 or 5 or 6 years old. Which is fine, and there are hundreds of great picture books to keep your reading time fascinating for all concerned.)

As someone who spends a lot of time talking with parents who read to their kids, I see two missteps which can get in the way of the transition to chapter books -- neither of them major, but you'll be happier if you avoid them.

The first I would call the Stuart Little Problem. We all remember a few wonderful books from childhood, but it's hard to remember at what age we read them. So, a relatively new parent who's been reading grown-up literature for the past 20 years will remember Stuart Little as a great piece of literature, but not remember that s/he was maybe 7 or 8 when last reading it. It's a fantastic book, but rife with really hard language and concepts for a three or four year-old. So I would counsel setting aside the wonderful memories and charging into the (possibly) unknown world of early chapter books that we've been talking about here.

The second obstacle to a smooth transition to longer books is the Magic Tree House Problem, well expressed by Margaret in the aforementioned comment. Somebody on the playground mentions there's this great series of short books about time travel and your kid will love them. Your kid might love them, but it will take you only two or three books (there are currently 43 of them, and counting) to realize they're pretty much all the same story, again and again and again. There's another series, about different kinds of fairies by "Daisy Meadows," which is equally addictive to the young and makes Magic Tree House look highbrow. You, the parent, will not be happy reading these books every night. As Margaret so tactfully put it, they're "a bit of a slog for Mom." These books are great when your child is reading on her or his own, but you can do better for
a read aloud.

Margaret and Annie both commented on the My Father's Dragon trilogy which, along with the abridged Wizard of Oz, (see 4/27 post) were my children's two favorites at this stage. The Jamie and Angus Stories (yesterday's 5/3 post) is great: my favorite chapter has to do with the family turning an outburst of paternal anger into an oft-repeated gentle family anecdote.
Toys Go Out, by Emily Jenkins is another book which feels like a collection of stories. It's about the internal lives of three beloved but clueless toys. Both Jamie and Toys have sequels. They're okay, but definitely a step down from the first books. Dick King-Smith, a British farmer best known for Babe (too old for pre-school crowd), has done a number of younger novels.
Martin's Mice is about a farm cat who keeps mice as pets: the mice resent it and the other cats think he's nuts for not eating them. A slightly edgier one is
Three Terrible Trins, which is the funniest book ever about revenge -- in this case it's the farmhouse mice driving the cats off the farm. And let's end this long post with a golden oldie (1938)
Mr. Popper's Penguins. Gives you the opportunity to explain both ice boxes and vaudeville (an act with 12 penguins, in this case), and to laugh a lot.

Love,
Deborah

Good starter chapter books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The Ramona excerpt makes me want to run right out and get a bunch of Beverly Cleary books. I read a few as a kid, but never became a huge fan of hers, not the way I was with Judy Blume or, later, Madeline L'Engle. For some reason, I had a Cleary/Blume opposition in my mind: I felt like I had to choose one of them, rather than reading both. Why I thought that, I have no idea. Looking for a team rivalry, but not interested in following sports?

Because Eleanor is so into stories, and her attention span for books is really quite good, we've tried a number of books over the last year that she was interested in but ultimately too young for: Mary Poppins,The Jungle Book, Little House in the Big Woods. They're all great books, and their time will come. A couple of your suggestions, however, have helped us get started on chapter books.

The Riverside Kids books, by Johanna Hurwitz, are perfect first chapter books. Unfortunately, some of them are out of print, but we've found a number in our library system, and you can find most of them pretty cheaply online. Here's a place where I'd try Alibris if IndieBound didn't get you what you were looking for.

The books focus on kids in two different families living in an apartment building in New York. Each book contains six linked stories which can be read together or stand alone (helpful at bedtime when you don't want to read all night). Nora and her little brother Teddy are the protagonists of the first two books: Busybody Nora and Superduper Teddy. Their neighbor Russell and his little sister Elisa star in some of the later ones: Rip-Roaring Russell, Russell and Elisa, and others. There's a complete list of them on Hurwitz's website.


Busybody Nora

We sat down with Busybody Nora, and Eleanor was rapt -- she wanted us to read the whole thing that day, and then asked for specific stories over and over in the days and weeks that followed. Her favorite is "Nora the Baby-Sitter," in which a miscommunication between two moms leaves five-year-old Nora in charge of her three-year-old brother and two-year-old neighbor for most of a day. There's some sweet misbehavior, but everything turns out fine, which sums up the tone of most of the stories. Hurwitz knows exactly how much plot a little kid can handle in one story. The prose isn't always gorgeous, but the stories tap into small desires and worries that little kids have. Eleanor refers to incidents in these books regularly.

I have a habit of tucking a slim book into the back of the diaper bag when we're going on a long subway ride. It has to be the right kind of book: enough stories to keep us occupied for a while, high-interest, not too big or bulky, paperback. Our current diaper bag book is The Jamie and Angus Stories, by Anne Fine, another of your excellent presents.


The Jamie and Angus Stories

I love Fine's tone in these stories. Jamie reads like a real kid, thoughtful and curious, and his relationship with the stuffed Highland bull Angus is creative and sweet. I love the adults in the stories too, the way you can hear Jamie's parents and Uncle Edward and Granny letting a little dry wit into their conversations with him. It's not at all treacly, but feels both warm and realistic. Eleanor's favorite story, by far, is "Strawberry Creams," the one in which Jamie, hospitalized for an unexplained stomach ailment, steals his hospital roommate's last 3 chocolates and then feels intensely guilty about it. This story prompted Eleanor's first real discussion of guilt, which is nice, because toddlers are essentially immoral. Are the sequels as good?

Love, Annie

Ramona Quimby & Mike Mulligan

Dear Annie,

I love the Peggy Orenstein piece -- can't believe I missed it when it came out. The other side of all that princess/pink stuff I see is that boys are pushed into fewer choices, too. I have heard parents discourage their boys from being interested in art projects ("That's for girls"). And just two days ago, I was suggesting a costume as a gift for a four year-old boy (the store where I sell books is actually a toy and book store), and his grandmother said, "His father won't let him play dress-up." We were discussing a fireman's uniform.

But this is a topic that makes steam come out of my ears. Let's move on to happier steam: good old
Mike Mulligan nd his Steam Shovel. I'm breaking the mold here, and offering for the rest of my entry one of the great moments in the Ramona books, by Beverly Cleary, a woman I consider one of the great children's book writers. I wouldn't recommend the Ramona books for Eleanor just yet -- she'll get more out of them when she has a little more experience of both school and life. (Although she might go for The Mouse and the Motorcycle now).

This is from the first chapter of
Ramona the Pest, on Ramona's first day of kindergarten:

Miss Binney stood in front of her class and began to read aloud from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, a book that was a favorite of Ramona’s because, unlike so many books for her age, it was neither quiet and sleepy nor sweet and pretty. Ramona … listened … to the story of Mike Mulligan’s old-fashioned steam shovel, which proved its worth by digging the basement for the new town hall of Poppersville in a single day….

As Ramona listened, a question came into her mind, a question that had often puzzled her about the books that were read to her. Somehow books always left out one of the most important things anyone would want to know. Now that Ramona was in school, and school was a place for learning, perhaps Miss Binney could answer the question….

“Miss Binney, I want to know – how did Mike Mulligan go to the bathroom when he was digging the basement of the town hall?”

Miss Binney’s smile seemed to last longer than smiles usually last. Ramona glanced uneasily around and saw that others were waiting with interest for the answer. Everybody wanted to know how Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom.

“Well – “ Miss Binney said at last. “I don’t really know, Ramona. The book doesn’t tell us.”…

“Maybe he stopped the steam shovel and climbed out of the hole he was digging and went to a service station,” suggested a boy named Eric.

“He couldn’t. The book says he had to work as fast as he could all day,” Howie pointed out. “It doesn’t say he stopped.”…

“Boys and girls,” [Miss Binney] began, and spoke in her clear, distinct way. “The reason the book does not tell us how Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom is that it is not an important part of the story. The story is about digging the basement of the town hall, and that is what the book tells us.”

Miss Binney spoke as if this explanation ended the matter, but the kindergarten was not convinced. Ramona knew and the rest of the class knew that getting to the bathroom was important. They were surprised that Miss Binney did not understand because she had showed them the bathroom the very first thing. Ramona could see there were some things she was not going to learn in school, and along with the rest of the class she stared reproachfully at Miss Binney.

Love,
Deborah

Books for grumpy, tired toddlers

Dear Aunt Debbie,

We got Pirate Girl from the library a while ago, and Eleanor adored it. Maybe it's time to buy a copy and get it into the regular rotation. I'm so sorry to hear Helga's Dowry is out of print! What is wrong with publishers?

I love the Williams column. My favorite exploration of the Disney princess phenomenon is a New York Times article from a few years ago by Peggy Orenstein called "What's Wrong with Cinderella?" I teach it in my Women's Voices class as we talk about gender expectations and how much of what little kids read and play with is nature, how much nurture. When should we as parents be looking for ever more princess (or train, or dinosaur) books, and when should we be trying to expand our kids' horizons?

We're going to Eleanor's good friend Ian's 3rd birthday party tomorrow, and tonight I'll be wrapping up three books. We went with one of your train recommendations, Choo Choo, by Virginia Lee Burton, as Ian is very into trains.


Choo Choo

The black and white charcoal illustrations are evocative; I must remember the style from another Burton book I read as a kid, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. It seems like a fun one to read aloud; I'll let you know how it goes over.

The other two are books you gave Eleanor over the past couple of years, both of which have spawned catchphrases in our daily life.


Grumpy Bird

Grumpy Bird, by Jeremy Tankard, has got to be one of my all-time favorites. Bird wakes up grumpy, too grumpy to eat, play, or fly, and so goes walking through the woods. He meets a series of annoyingly happy animal friends, all of whom end up following him ("Walking? I love walking!"). When he realizes that they'll do whatever he does (jump, stand on one leg), he snaps out of his mood and they all fly back to his place for a snack. What I love most about this book is the way it quietly makes fun of the sappy happy characters in so many lesser children's books. Every animal he passes asks him what he's doing, until finally Bird explodes: "WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO KNOW WHAT I'M DOING?" Cracks me up every time. This is also a great book to read with different accents for each of the characters. We usually read Fox's voice in a British accent, and Beaver's in a slow, kind of dumb one. Eleanor loves the book, and it gives us a handy shorthand for days when she's in a bad mood -- Oh, are you a Grumpy Bird today?


Will You Carry Me?

The last is Will You Carry Me?, by Heleen van Rossum, illustrated by Peter van Harmelen. The title is, of course, a familiar refrain to any parent of a toddler, and the book is completely charming. Thomas and Mommy are headed home from the playground, and Thomas is too tired to walk. Mommy (who has an awesome Dutch sense of style) comes up with several other things they can do: "Well, if you're too tired to walk or jump, maybe we should try...Swimming!" Mommy's good-natured channeling of Thomas's whining has popped into my head on more than one occasion when we're out and Eleanor is fussing in the same way. The pictures here are filled with strange little creatures who also walk, run, jump, swim, etc. -- it bears close reading.

Love, Annie