Happy Mother’s Day to you, if it applies, and to your mother, because it’s fun to say “Your mother” and mean it in a nice way. My Mother’s Day started off with my going back to bed with a migraine (fucker) and then getting back up once I was firmly in the embrace of painkillers to enjoy having my children and husband make me breakfast and give me gifts.
One of my gifts, from Freebird: The Mommy Book, by Todd Parr: “Some mommies work at home. Some mommies work in big buildings. All mommies love to watch you sleep.” I love the Parr books, especially The Daddy Book, which we read all the time with Freebird. Baba O’Riley gave me a copy of The Family Book, which is terribly sweet and made me smile-cry with the pictures of families of different colors and sizes. My favorite part was the page about how some families look like each other, and some families look like their pets. If I look like our pets, we are so screwed. And hairy. Very very hairy.
Since my gifts were books – oh, how my family knows me! – I got to thinking, what are your favorite children’s books of the very-young-child variety? There are some that are incredibly old but stand up for repeated tellings even when they’re nearly 80. Ferdinand the Bull was published in 1936, and I remember having my own copy when I was a kid.
Other books that are mainstays of the home library are Goodnight Moon, Guess How Much I Love You (though thanks to The Sneeze I sometimes say, “little brown nut-hair,” which is awful and funny), and I Love You, Goodnight.
What about you, and your bookshelf? What books form the corners of your childhood memories? And what books do you pass along to children in your life?
Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal , both by Robert McCloskey.
EEE!! Thank you hollygee! I can’t tell you how many years I’ve been looking for those books. (My Googlefu skills are weak, and cause me shame.)
The thing about Love You Forever is that it is *sick* and my boyfriend gets all snide about it and it always cracks me up and it makes me cry *anyway*. (We’re bad. Have you seen Beatrix Potter’s Tale of the Bad Bunny? “This is a man with a gun.”)
Before I had a kid I was on the side of the gorilla but now I am totally the zookeeper. And I have a very fragile, much-beloved copy of To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street that we read, plus a paperback copy of Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats from my childhood.
When my little boy was even littler he liked me to read him Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, and now he likes to “read” it to me (he’s almost 3 but he has it memorized) with drum solo & be bops.
We’ve been reading Stuart Little out loud to him but what he really, really likes are Jane Yolen’s Commander Toad books – we call them My First Geek Books. They’re full of puns and total dorkiness. Very cute.
And, oh! We got the best picture book at the library the other day:
Pink by Nan Gregory and Luc Melanson. The little girl wants a doll she can’t afford and some other little girl buys it before she saves up the money, but her mom and dad take her on a pink picnic and later her dad talks about something he wants and can’t have, and plays music while she dances. It was so sweet, and not all super happy ending.
Also one about a crocodile kidnapped from Egypt and put on display in Paris who escapes and lives in the sewers. It’s a Regency even (the whole Napoleonic war era is Regency, right?)
I am really enjoying having a good reason to browse the kids section. Did you know Louise Erdrich and Dar Williams wrote kids books?
…The Monster at the End of This Book.
No, not deep. Not “it made me cry” or “I read it to my parents fifty times.” However, it has always made me laugh. Always.