Mommy! Mommy!

 By Taro Gomi

I really like this author.  These baby books are visually appealing and really simple.

 This story in particular is so easy for a baby to understand.  Look, there's Mama!  Oh, no, where is she?  There she is!

Over and over again.

My son goes around the house saying, "MAMA MAMA!  NO!  NO MAMA!"

He would make me read this book all day if I was willing.

Where is Baby's Belly Button

 By Karen Katz

This one is also very popular.  It's a lift-the-flap book.  Plus it's all about body parts.  This is one of the very few books that my youngest will ask to read.

There is one African-American baby and there is one East-Asian baby and the rest are white.  Equal numbers of girls and boys.

So that's something.

All Around the Town

This is a book from my husband's childhood in Britain.  It's nice to have a book of British vocabulary, and it's also nice to have a super large picture book to pour over, but content wise, this is pretty sub-par compared to anything by Richard Scarry.

First off, the printing is cheap.  Some of the colours aren't printed in the lines.  The colour pallet is pretty bland and unappealing. 

The names of the characters are annoying, and only some of them have names.  The others are just "bunny" or "cat".  Though I guess that's a pretty minor complaint.

Some of the pictures have weirdly drawn perspective problems.  I'm not quite sure what's happening with this fence.  There are worse pages.  You can still tell what's going on, at least.

Scarry employs a lot of slapstick, and this book does not.  Some of the buildings featured are based on the same building frame, which is kind of boring.  My kids don't like reading the story, which is REALLY boring, but they do like looking at all of the objects and animals.

Overall, it's worth picking up if you can find it at a second hand store, but I wouldn't spend a whole bunch of money on it.

The Real Mother Goose

Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright

Hey, hey, hey!  It's the full book!  And it's widely available and constantly being reprinted.

This is a great compilation of all the essential nursery rhymes with tons of early 20th century Classical revival style illustrations.  Very Ars Nouveau, I think.

I'm no art historian, and I recognize that that description is kind of terrible.

 Look at this Robin Hood.  So effeminate.  Tall and lean with a baby face.  Pale blended watercolours with a fine outline.  I love it.

There are many, many full page illustrations, and most pages have smaller illustrations intertwined with the text.

The text is a little old fashioned.  A lot of death and gore and stuff, just the way it's always been.  But you can always pick and choose which rhymes you read aloud.  It's a big thick hardcover.

100 Things that Make Me Happy

 By Amy Schwartz

This book is great.  The art is cute, the happy things are well chosen, and it's easy enough for a beginner reader to fumble through.

 No sentences!  My daughter is trying to read, but more than two words in a row is way too much work.  This book was great to open at random and read together.

The rhymes work, the rhythm doesn't.  But it isn't supposed to be rhythmic in the least and doesn't have any kind of pattern, so that's refreshing.

Friday Post - Bathtime

 We've gotten a lot of bath toys, we've made a few purchases, and we've tried a lot of different hand-me-downs.  Here is a list of toys and gadgets that worked for us.

 My sister had a proper baby bath, like the one pictured here, and it worked really well for her.  It would have worked with our first baby, but we had a little baby sling and a large oval shaped bin instead.  It worked fine.  We had to use that same big tub for baby number two, because when we borrowed my sister's special little bathtub he started trying to roll himself out of it the minute he had any muscle.  This is the kid who at 8 or 9 months was crawling ON HIS BACK USING HIS HEAD FOR LEVERAGE.

 Somehow we managed to get by bathing the first baby without ever needing a faucet cover.  We got one immediately for baby number two, and good thing too, because he's managed to bash his head against it numerous times.  He's also figured out how to take it apart, because it has a pretty simple design.  That hasn't caused us problems, though.  Yet.

 The bathtub floor stickies were essential for baby number two as well, because he gets excited and decides to run or stomp in the bath.  Even with the stickies he has fallen down at least four times.  But I don't want a full mat because they're so much harder to clean.  (He's pretty much learned his lesson at this point, anyway.)  These can just be shoved to dry in the toy holder.

 We got the kids a rubber duck, of course.  We bought the big one, of course.  I didn't really think about how big 32 centimeters was when we purchased it.  It's huge.  The kids like to pretend to ride this thing. They're both CRAZY about it and talk about it even when it isn't bathtime.  He's their friend.

Now, the rubber duck holds air and has a hole in it, which is a big mistake for a bath toy.  They fill with mildew and become dangerous and impossible to clean.  My husband cut a slit in its mouth so that we can bleach the inside of it and water can pour out of it easily.  It will be the only squeezy toy we get.

 The kids like to pour water.  These Ikea stacking cups are fantastic for that, because they have holes in them, and slits for pouring, and they stack. 

The kids also like to drink bathwater, so sometimes I skip putting these in.

These cups are no longer available.  :(

 This Green Toys Tugboat is our favourite toy for pouring, by far, though.  And we have TWO of them in different colours.  Which means they each get to hold one.  They can't figure out how to drink from it, either.  Green Toys does a whole load of awesome bath toys that are designed to drain properly, pour and float.

 We fill out the tub with a pack of foamy letters and numbers.  We got them when my daughter went through her alphabet obsession.  My son doesn't seem to be that interested, so I don't know that he'll catch on as fast as she did.  Also, we're missing a load of them.  But he likes to stick them to the tub, or the wall, or his sister...

 That's pretty much it for toys.  The kids are satisfied with that, and it's easy to keep track of.  We do have a random bath book, but I use it for diaper changes so that I don't have to worry about their bathroom reader getting poopy.  I'll have to get more for potty time.

We store everything in one of these sliding bath toy trays.  Everything else we looked up was hung from a suction hook.  We had suction hooks on a few things in our bathroom and they were constantly falling down in the middle of the night.  Plus, the toy holders made with netting take forever to dry and are a pain to get into.

I have a drawer right next to the tub that this rack fits in perfectly, so when everything is dry, I just shove it in the drawer.  We are completely satisfied with it.

Five Little Monkeys Reading in Bed

 Written by Eileen Christelow

This is part of a series about the 5 little monkeys that is obviously inspired by the "jumping on the bed" rhyme.  (There is a book in the series based on the rhyme, too, though I haven't read it.)

I got this one out in desperation because my son hated every book in the house save one Sandra Boynton book that we were all tired of.

 He really didn't like this book, either, but didn't mind flipping through it on a car trip.

It's not written particularly well; you have to bend the sentences a bit to make them match up rhythmically.  The story is okay.  The monkeys make so much noise reading books in bed that Mom takes the books away, and then gets caught reading them herself.  My daughter thought it was funny.

I kind of really like that it's a single mom with five kids.  And, like, quintuplets or something.  That's brutal.

There are lots of books in this series.  Pretty much any kid who has heard the original rhyme would go crazy for any of these books, like my daughter did.  We ended up buying the one where they make the birthday cake, and I don't mind having it around the house, even though I have the same complaints about it.

Moo, Baa, La La La!

 By Sandra Boynton

My kids both love this book.  My youngest makes me read it repeatedly.

 Mostly because it has animal noises that he likes to copy. 

My daughter likes this page, because she's starting to understand jokes.

The ending only made sense to my daughter after she was three.  She now makes funny noises and laughs when it's finished.  It's nice to have a book that I can read to both of them at the same time.

Dive In!

 By April Jones Prince
Illustrated by Michelle Berg

This is a favourite in the house.  There are fights.

The writing is really bad.  Nothing makes any sense to babies, or even toddlers.  They should have not tried to rhyme any of it.

But the concept is cute.  Working mice coming out with all of their machines and equipment to fill the bathtub with water and toys.

All of the movable pieces are super sturdy. Nothing has been broken on this book yet!  My toddler is mesmerized every time he sits down with it.

Going to the Potty

 By Fred Rogers

Another win at the thrift store!

We're still working on potty training.  Don't judge us, we're up against some pretty serious hurdles.

But, even though it isn't happening any day soon, it's nice to sit back and read this book and talk to my oldest about that someday when she'll stop wearing diapers.

I love it for many reasons.  First, it's real pictures of real kids.  Which makes the potty training seem real as apposed to this imaginary thing that cartoon figures do.

I love it because it uses plain simple language and talks about the different potties and the different ways that parents might talk about bowel movements.  It's a really universal book.

I love it because it breaks the whole thing down to be a small part of a more complex developmental stage at which toddlers are learning to become children and detach themselves from their parents bit by bit and what that means to the child.  It is so interesting to my daughter for her to read a book about her that seems to know just what she's up to and just how she feels.

What in heaven's name would we do without Mr. Rogers?

(This book did not potty train my child.  But I think she's starting to turn the corner and stop being so stubborn about it.)

We're Going to the Farmers' Market

 By Stephan Page

You know me.  I'm a pretty big hippie.  And I'm all about fruits and veg and farmers' markets.  But I picked this book up primarily because the art was appealing.  It was the nicest looking book at the library that week and, believe me, I looked through each one.  I thought maybe my son would recognize the food and be mildly interested.  Plus it's in verse, and he will currently only sit still for board books with verse.

Well, the verse is not metered.  They tried and failed.  Badly.  So my son hated it because he's so damn picky.

 But the pictures are still nice.  Lots of geometric  shapes and symmetry and simple colours and patterns.  It's very pretty.

I wish there was no text.  They tried to do a version of "To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Pig" and got lost in this sustainability message.  It's so heavy handed that it felt like they were trying to make my children feel bad for straying from the 100 mile diet.

Plus, this meal.  Like, I would eat that, sure.  And I always serve good food for my kids.  We eat food from just about any culture and keep a variety of spices in the house.  But my one year old is not eating fish and olives.  In fact, he's teething and refuses anything that isn't blended into mush and snuck into his mouth in between bites of cracker.  And furthermore, with a baby in the house, is it possible to make labour intensive meals?  No, really, I'm curious.  When do I get to stop making casseroles?  Also, I don't take kids to market under the age of 3 if I can help it because grabbing groceries and paying for them with an angry toddler in your arms is the worst experience.

Is this a board book that teaches toddlers about everything they're missing out on because they can't get it together and eat real food and behave at the store?  Or is this is a board book for 6 year olds?  I can't decide.

What Do You Want?

 By Lars Klinting

This book was great!  We found it at the library.  I had to dig through stacks of baby books to find it.  It was the only one that looked half decent.

Digging through board books at the library is the worst ever. Especially if you have a wild walking baby with you who is inexplicably attracted to CD racks.  But who also loves picking books up at random off of shelves and running to the front with them in an attempt to shove them all into the return slot.  HE HAS TO PUT EVERYTHING AWAY.

But obviously we've stopped taking him to the library for now, so we don't have this problem anymore.

Every page has an object, and when you turn the page you find out what belongs to that object.

The only part I'm not so keen on is the little old man wanting his hat and the little old woman wanting her man, but it's not the worst thing.  It really isn't.  Maybe it's really commentary on how the man losing his hair is having an identity crisis, and the woman basically wants for nothing but her husband because she's got herself all sorted.  Or maybe it's just a really lazily written baby book.

The best parts are the stroller and the baby, or the foot wanting a shoe, or the chair wanting the table.  Basically everything else in the book.  These are things that babies understand.

For me, when I see this page, I can't help but think of my Grandma who is single and has the craziest happiest social life.  Rolling her eyes at little old men trying to hit on her.

My kids loved this book so much that it ended up covered in crayon before we returned it (luckily it comes out easily with eraser.)

Snuggle Puppy

 By Sandra Boynton

Boynton does some nice baby books, some of which my kids are crazy about, some of which are funnier to read as an older kid or adult, but there are some real duds, too.  Like this one.

It comes with a CD with music that you listen to while you read the lyrics.

 I can't really be bothered to say a lot about this.  The drawing is pretty lazy.  Most of the book is just colourful text.  The text itself is really, really lazy rhyming.

But, I guess if you like this sort of thing, then whatever.  It's not the worst book I've ever read.

Blue Hat, Green Hat

 By Sandra Boynton

Everyone gets this one, right?  I think.

My daughter didn't mind this book.  My son was OBSESSED with it.  As soon as he learned to walk (just before his first bithday), he would find this book, rush over to me, place it in my lap and sit patiently while I read it.  When I finished, he would grab it, flip it, and throw it back in my hands for another read-through.

It was pretty impressive because otherwise he hated storytime and wouldn't sit still for anything.

He obviously didn't understand the content.  He liked it, and still does, because it's really simplistic and very rhythmic.  He still mimics the rhythm of the text with melodic nonsense words every time he picks it up.

Ten Little Lambs

 By Alice B. McGinty
Illustrated by Melissa Sweet

This isn't a bad little book.  It's been pretty popular.  It starts out as a sleepover with ten children, but once they're in bed they transform into sheep.

 The text is a repetitive rhyme that counts down from ten to one.  On each page there's a different mischievous activity that the sheep engage in.

Most of the rhythm is good, but not all of it.

On each page, on of the sheep yawns or falls asleep, and the faces of the sleeping sheep who didn't make it through the night are shown along the sides of the pages.  It's pretty engaging.

It's not the best art and not the best poetry, but it's a pretty good concept.  My kids were engaged with it.

My Red Balloon

 By Kazuaki Yamada

I liked this book when I first read it.

A girl and her balloon get on a bus.  She loses the balloon.  The bus fills with animals and they chase the balloon through the countryside.

 I like the art.  It's very simple.  The balloon is hidden on each page.  My daughter mostly liked it.

In the end the balloon pops.  The girl cries.  They see the sunset and decide that it is a red balloon.

My husband doesn't like it because he thinks it's heavy handed.  My daughter was upset for days, asking me every night why the balloon was gone and where it was and why is it popped.

But I think it could be good for kids who aren't so sensitive.