BabyLit Children's Books

We are a family of readers.  We all love sticking our nose in a book and getting lost in it.  It has always been really important to us that our children share that love.

When Pickle was an infant and toddler, we had lots of books, and shared them with her.  However - they were sort of boring, I'll be honest.  There were the picture books of feet and elbows and dolls and the like when she was really little.  As she got older, we incorporated Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon types of books.  Can I quickly say that I really just don't care for Pat the Bunny?  It's super-boring graphics, repetitive without really instilling any vocabulary - the tiny little interactive pieces were really the only redeeming value in the book.  As a parent, it would be mind-numbing to read these books that really had no inherent learning value.  So, when I recently got a chance to review some BabyLit children's books with the Peanut, I was ecstatic.

What are BabyLit books?  Easy.  They're literary classics, made for little ones - but with a sense of style (LINK).  Everything from Dracula to Anna Karenina is there, but has been made age-appropriate for a small child while still appealing to adults.

Here is the selection that we were lucky enough to sample:

Pride & Prejudice, Alice In Wonderland, Sense & Sensibility, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Sherlock Homes in The Hound of the Baskervilles.  

Already this was warming my former-English lit-major heart.  Reading these, I was much more engaged and interested than I am reading other kids' books - these are stories that I know, and it was fun for me to see how they took them and made them appropriate for children.  They were quaint and fun and cool.

What was also neat about each book is that they became a "primer" in a certain skill or area.  For example, Pride & Prejudice is a "counting primer" for kids:

The BabyLit book took a classic, familiar text, and turned it into a beautifully-illustrated lesson on counting.  Five sisters (one for each of the Bennet girls).  Four proposals (beware, there's a bit of a spoiler here if you're not familiar with the book!), etc.  This is a great way to introduce the concept of numbers to a very small child without making it intimidating.  Our little Peanut man loved it, but it was interesting enough that our 4.5-year-old Pickle also asks me to read it to her over and over even though she knows her numbers.  Since P&P is one of my two or three favorite books of all time, I have no issue obliging this request!
 
The Sherlock Holmes book is a "sounds primer":

Each of the pages featured an example of onomatopoeia - a door that creaks, a shoe that scrapes, and several other words created from their corresponding sounds.  Our little Peanut loves this one the best, because I try and make the words sound lifelike while I'm reading it to him.  Here's how he tries to read it to himself:

I swear this wasn't posed.

He usually spends most of his time chewing on the books; this is actually just fine with the BabyLit books, as they are thick cardboard board books.  As such, they are incredibly durable.  

Like I mentioned before, these books are also cool.  When they're not being read by the littles, we actually have them sitting out on our coffee table as conversation pieces.  We've had a few friends pick them up and leaf through them already - they always brings a smile, and are a great discussion piece.  

I loved these books, both of my kids loved these books, and our guests have loved these books.  I would absolutely display these even if we didn't have kids, but they're great books that capture the attention of a child while simultaneously teaching them something.  (That's something of a rarity these days!)  In addition, they foster awareness and love for the classical literature that is beneficial for the children to be exposed to later in life.  What a great idea!

(Totally as an aside, but I just think this is adorable - check out their shop!  How cute is it for a three-year-old to carry her dolls and blocks and notebooks in a Wuthering Heights tote?!)

 

Book Review - Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes

So, there’s a very cool cat on the preschool circuit these days. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him – Pete the Cat. You know from the way he casually uses his nickname that he’s already oozing awesomeness – no Peter, no Pedro, no surname, just Pete. Sort of like the Madonna of cats. Or maybe Madonna is too old of a reference now, I don’t know – I guess Pete is like the Pitbull of cats.

Anyway. Pete gets in all kinds of adventures. He goes to school, he likes buttons. All activities that are very relatable to preschoolers. The story that has received a premium of attention at our house, however, is Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes.

We picked this book up at Borders for about $12. With the book comes a free download of the song that is sung multiple times within the book. I highly suggest downloading the song before even endeavoring to sing the song to your preschooler, because they will immediately call you out if you sing it incorrectly. Here’s the link to the downloads: http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/feature/petethecat/

After we familiarized ourselves with the song, we jumped into reading the book. The story starts with our cat friend strutting down the street wearing some awesome white tennis shoes. I think you have to just suspend your disbelief that any cat on earth would allow hard-soled shoes on their feet, but I digress. Pete walks along in these shoes, just singing about how much he loves them, when he steps in a large pile of discarded fruit. I think it’s blueberries first. The book doesn’t really clarify if the fruit is rotting, or why it’s in a pile the size of a city dump on the sidewalk, but that’s not even the really weird part. Cats are sort of fastidious and quick on their feet – I have trouble believing that a cat would not see a pile of blueberries several times bigger than he is sitting in the middle of a sidewalk. Regardless, he steps directly into the middle of this pile.

Does this anger Pete, or disturb him in the slightest that his beloved white shoes are now the color of discarded blueberries? Goodness, no! Pete is so zen that he just changes his song, now singing about how much he loves his blue shoes. I sort of picture Pete as the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp, all rolled into one package of laid-back black cat.

Now, after this first mishap, Pete continues on his way. One would figure he’d probably be more on the lookout for giant piles of fruit. You would be wrong, however. Pete comes across a mountainous pile of strawberries. I honestly have no clue how he could not have seen this, since he would have had to scale this pile, but yet he plows into it again, further ruining his shoes. Now they’re not blue, but red. Did Pete cry? Goodness, no! He still is just the epitome of calm and collected. Once more, he just casually adjusts his song, now indicating how much he adores his red shoes.

Luckily, Pete now seems to be on the lookout for berries and fruit. We do not see him step into anymore for the remainder of the book. However, he’s not aware enough to sidestep mud, which turns his shoes brown. (Again, it’s cool, now he loves those shoes.) Then, he steps in a giant bucket of water. This water washes away all of those fabulous colors Pete had grown to love, and now he’s back to his white shoes. Luckily, Pete still doesn’t care. The moral of the story is that you apparently shouldn’t care what you step in or what life throws at you, it’s all good.

From a metaphorical standpoint, I like this. Don’t sweat the small stuff, etc., etc. These are good life lessons. However, since I’m the one who buys my particular preschooler’s rather expensive shoes, I wish we could illustrate this with another lesson rather than that it’s okay to step in crap constantly. I can’t picture this being a popular lesson at her school, either – I wouldn’t really want a classroom of 3-year-olds with stanky, messy feet because they all decided to try and see if they could turn their shoes brown. Pete’s a cat, couldn’t he just not cry over spilt milk? I mean, I don’t want her dumping out jugs of milk or anything, either, so maybe that’s not a good lesson, either. I’ll probably circle back to this when I’ve had more time to consider it.

Book Review: A Bargain for Frances

Earlier this week at Pickle's preschool, they had a bin of free books that we could take home.  I saw a book I had read when I was a child and vaguely remembered liking it in the fogs of my memory.  I'll preface this post by saying - I'm going to just spoiler the crap out of this book, so you probably want to stop now if you want to be surprised if you ever read this book to your child.  I'm not going to judge you for what is sort of an odd desire, but just reiterate that you are going to learn the ending if you keep reading.

The book I found and picked up was A Bargain for Frances by Russell Hoban (LINK):

It is the story of a young female rodent - a badger, I think, and her adventure with a friend.  I'll just jump right in on how the tale goes.

The scene opens with Frances talking to her mom.  The conversation goes approximately like this:

Frances:  "Hey, Mom, I'm going to Thelma's house.  See you later!"
Mom:  "Yeah, be careful."
Frances:  "Why on earth would you possibly tell me to be careful going to a girlfriend's house?"
Mom:  "Because Thelma's a little hag.  Remember the time you went over there to play boomerang, and she spent the whole time bouncing it off your skull?  Or the time you wanted to go ice skating, but the ice on the pond was really fresh, and she insisted you go try it first?  Remember how you came home with hypothermia?"
Frances:  "Oh, right, I remember now!  Surely nothing can go wrong this time, I'm just going over to play teaset.  See ya!"

But clearly Frances is wrong, and something CAN go wrong, or else there would be no premise to the book.

So, Frances goes over to play tea party with Thelma.  (Coincidentally - I don't think these names were really all that popular even in 1970, when this book was originally published.  Maybe with badgers, though, I don't know.  I haven't googled that.)  They get there, and start playing with Thelma's plastic tea set with red flowers, which is apparently the worst thing in the world.  Thelma asks Frances why she doesn't have one.  Frances, admittedly, gets a bit uppity and says that she's saving her money for a real china one with blue flowers, because they're so much better; she'd had one previously and broken it.  Here's a screen shot of Thelma's apparent plastic crap-fest:

So, what happens next shows that Thelma is the worst badger ever.  She starts working psychologically on Frances.  That conversation goes sort of like this, and it works best if you hear Thelma's voice in your head with, like, a vampire accent or something:

Thelma:  Well, you should buy my teaset.
Frances:  But I don't want this giant turd of a teaset.  I just said that.  I've saved up $2.11 for this new one.
Thelma:  This one is plastic and won't ever break unless you step on it [side note - this is a pretty suspicious thing to say].  And it's got these little red flowers on it.
Frances:  Yeah, I got that, but I want a blue china one with blue flowers and a dude on a boat on the side.  I have literally told you that six times.
Thelma:  Whatever.  I don't want to sell you mine anymore, anyway.
Frances:  Whaaaaat?  Why?  Well, I guess that's okay, since I still want the china one.
Thelma:  I don't think you can even buy the china one anymore.  I had a friend who saved up $2.12, and she went to the store, and her mom couldn't find them anywhere.  She even had a guy in the mafia look for them, and NO LUCK.  So, anyway, good luck, sucker.
Frances:  Whoa, whoa, whoa.  This sounds like a totally valid scenario.  Let me run home and get my money and give it to you for this teaset I don't like, just so that I don't end up with no teaset.

See the ninja mind tricks there??  Anyway, so Frances does that, and she takes home the red plastic teaset.  Her sister, I forget her name but she carries around a wooden duck on a string or something, asks her, "Why do you have that teaset?  It's ugly as heck.  I like the blue flower china one."  Frances explains you can't buy those anymore, and her sister says something to the effect of, "That's absolutely fallacious information.  My little friend bought one for $2.05 at the candy store that we visit on the daily just last week, they had dozens."  And then, in your brain, you can see poor little Frances' brain just explode into a million pieces when she realizes her mistake.

She walks to the candy store to confirm the duck sister's story, and she sees this in the window:

That would be the evil Thelma purchasing the exact tea set Frances wanted with Frances' own money.  But Thelma had said "no backsies" all super-foreshadowy like earlier, so there wasn't anything that Frances could do to say backsies.

So, does Frances take this lying down?  No.  She puts a penny in the sugar bowl or something of the crappy teaset, and calls Thelma.  And then she proceeds to exact psychological warfare on Thelma.  She calls her and it goes sort of like this:

Thelma:  Hi, Frances.  Remember, no backsies.  [Side note - and you just know from someone who picks up the phone and starts a conversation like this that they are the devil.]
Frances:  Yeah, whatever.  Anyway, since there's no backsies, I'm gonna go ahead and keep what I found inside the sugar dish.  See ya!

She hangs up, and sits smugly beside the phone waiting for Thelma to call back.  Which she does.  And it goes like this:

Thelma:  Hi, this is Thelma.
Frances:  Yeah, I knew you were going to call back.  NO BACKSIES, HAG.
Thelma:  Right, but I think I might have left my birthday present from Uncle Jerry in the sugar bowl.  Was it a diamond bracelet?
Frances:  Nope.  Not telling, no backsies.
Thelma:  Um, or it might have been money.  It might have been $2.  Or, wait, wait, $5!  That's it, it was $5!
Frances:  I don't have to tell you how much money I found in there, no backsies.  If you want it, I want my money back.
Thelma:  Well, I spent your money in the most diabolical way ever.  How about I bring you the new tea set I bought, and the 5 cents extra I made off of you, and then I can get mine back?
Frances:  Whatever.  I guess.

So Thelma gets there, and they do the switch back.  And Thelma finds out it was only a penny in there.  And then with the coldness of a serial killer, all she says is, "That wasn't very nice."  And Frances is like, "Nope, it wasn't.  Nor was what you did."  Thelma says she's going to have to be careful around Frances from now on (in a quaint show of irony), Frances says something like, "Do you want to be careful, or be friends?"  Thelma says, "Friends," so they take that extra nickle and go and buy candy at the candy store.  

I feel like the ending of this book is something of a letdown.  First, it's saying that if you just straight-up lie and stoop to someone else's level to exact revenge, you'll get what you want.  And that may actually be how things work in the business world, but this is a book for 3 to 5 year olds.  I'm not sure that's the exact message we want to be sending.  Also, Frances just goes back to trusting Thelma, who has screwed her over three times, just because Thelma says she wants to be friends?  If I were Frances' mom, I'd be pissed.  I wouldn't want that little badger anywhere near my daughter, I'd go all Mama Bear on her.  I find this all very unfulfilling.  I think maybe it would have been cooler if Frances, after saying, "Nope, what I did wasn't cool, neither was what you did," she did something like light a candy cigarette, glare coolly at Thelma, and walk out of her life forever.  That would be much more appropriate.  But whatever.

Where the Wild Things Are - Book review

It is fair to say that sometimes I over-analyze things.  It's just sort of how I am.  I fear that I may be going a little overzealous on the book Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak (LINK):

I am admittedly a little confused on the message of this book.  I mean, Cat In the Hat?  Message there is obviously not to let a 6-foot talking cat into your house, he's going to screw crap up.  Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? has the whole exposition of the concept of endangered animals, I get that.  But I'm not really sure what the point of Where the Wild Things Are is, as delightful as I find the book.  And it's a very fun book, we read it often, I just am not entirely sure what message I am delivering.

The book starts with a child named Max in a furry suit (a wolf, more specifically).  We see him chase the dog with a fork and tell his mom that he's going to cannibalize her.  Here, check out this poor dog's face:

That dog is giving nothing short of an "oh, crap" face there.  Anyway, Max's mom decides the appropriate method of dealing with her possessed child is to withhold food from him, and sends him to bed without dinner.  (I guess she didn't want to feed the beast?  Maybe he's like a Gremlin, and he gets evil with food?  I don't know.)

So, then Max appears to go into some sort of dissociative fugue.  His bedroom turns into a forest.  This admittedly is one of my favorite parts of the book, I looked all over for tutorials on how to make A a bed that looks like this, but came up short:

So, then his floor turns into the ocean, and he sails over hours and in and out of days, etc.  He gets to a land of monsters.  At first he wants to make as much noise as possible, so he leads them on a rumpus and they make him king of the monsters.  But then he must get pissed or something, and decides to also send THEM to bed without any food.  So, I guess it's sort of like a cycle of food withholding, which really isn't anything to joke about.  Anyway, he gets sort of bored and wants to be back near his mom (Stockholm syndrome?), so he sails back home just in time to see dinner waiting on him.

I use the book to explain to A about all of the places her imagination can take her and so on - but I really do wonder that maybe Max is an undiagnosed, untreated, possibly violent schizophrenic. What if this poor boy is crying out for help when he tries to eat people and dogs, and then he loses time in reality?  Surely the treatment can't be to keep him from eating, unless all of the food you're giving him is laced with hallucinogenics.  And if that IS the case - just stop feeding him hallucinogenics.  It's actually pretty easy, I just don't eat hallucinogenics all of the time.  I'm doing it right now!

Seriously, though, we do love this book.  But, yeah.  It's sort of weird.

I Can't Wait to Meet You (Book about IVF)

As I mentioned in a previously, we had fertility issues.  Me, specifically - and pretty severe ones.  We were finally blessed with our miracle baby (for a whole host of reasons) after five years and in-vitro fertilization.  Luckily, our area has an IVF clinic with a lab in the top 5% of all clinics.

During my pregnancy with A, I wondered how we would explain to her about what made her so special.  We already were going to have to explain her angel sister in Heaven, but that's somehow been easier than explaining that she is even more special than I can explain.  While I was on six months' worth of bedrest, I came across this book:  I Can't Wait to Meet You.

It's got a really nice idea behind it.  A mother who conceived her child via IVF wrote a book explaining the process.  There are some parts that are just so sweet, talking about how the child was treasured long before he or she was ever conceived - which is true, IVF babies are the culmination of a long time of hard work, expense, heartache, and physical pain.  It does a pretty good job of using terms a child can mostly understand, but it does throw in some terms that are a bit more clinical than I really wanted to dive into at ages 2 and 3.  For example, I think the word "sperm" is used about six times in here.  Not really a discussion I wanted to have for a few years, but I guess medical exactness can never be a bad thing - so we've just rolled with it.

What does kill me about this book is that it fairly imprecisely covers the emotions and physical discomfort endured in IVF.  For example, here's a crappy camera phone shot of the pages describing egg retrieval (sorry, my scanner is still packed somewhere from when we moved two months ago):

Anyway - first of all, it looks a little bit like that nurse is just going to suck the eggs out with that tubing there.  Um, there's actually an enormously long, scary needle that goes through the wall of your uterus and into your ovaries, sucking out the eggs one by one.  I don't know if long, snaky tubing going up into your vagina and then sucked on would be more or less weird?  Definitely less hygienic, and what if she accidentally swallowed one?  Many women are asleep during this, but I was not due to my resistance to narcotics - I was not comfortable like this lady in the photo is, and there certainly was no blanket discreetly covering my lady regions.  It hurt like heck while about six people got an up-close-and-personal view of my entire anatomy.  Also, I can assure you that a fishbowl filled with (presumably) toilet water was not the preferred storage device for the retrieved eggs.  I'm hoping the procedure would have cost a lot less if that's all the more technical it was.

Here's the book's depiction of the sperm donation (by the way - DUDE, guys have it so much easier):

Just a few dozen issues with this:
1.  No doctor ever has handled the creepy "hey, here's my semen" hand-off.  They pay other people to handle that.  If he had to, he certainly wouldn't be jovial about it, or get his clipboard (or bare hands) anywhere near that cup.
2.  The wife would not be present and upright for this transaction.  She's just been pumped full of narcotics and had the insides of her ovaries ripped out, she's probably not there to give the big thumbs-up to her husband, who only had to go into a dark room with a Playboy and have at himself.
3.  Wow.  I've got to say it - that's an impressive amount of semen.  That cup is at least half full, maybe more.  That's the only reason I can guess that old Charlie is grinning like crazy there - if their fertility issues had been male-factor like a low sperm count, just having a half-pint of semen there has to even out the odds.

So, Charlie and Grace have given their biological products, and the embryos are growing.  In the book, they get strong by hitting punching bags.  I don't know, I'm not an embryologist, maybe that is accurate, but I somehow doubt it.

They get ready for the embryonic joyride back into Mom then.  (This is where that tubing is actually used, but nobody blows in or sucks on it.)  Here's the depiction of the embryos being transferred into the neck of the uterus and hopefully implanting:

For a book that is fairly clinical, it did make me laugh that my fallopian tubes and uterus are depicted as a slip-and-slide.  I also see at least three embryos in this photo, which is not the statistical average reported by the CDC - but I digress.

Anyway - in short, I think this is a great book.  I change the names of Grace and Charlie to "Mama and Daddy," and the name of the doctor to that of our reproductive endocrinologist, so that A thinks it was especially for her.  It's sweet, and it makes her happy, and she loves to read it.  I love the last few pages where it drives home just how special IVF babies are, which is a lovely idea.  It's just a bit funny how it gets there at a few points.

Ideally, I would like to write a book for A and any future children (we have two frozen embryos left) that tells their unique story, including their sister who passed on.  But this is a pretty sweet way to explain it in the meantime.

Love You Forever - book

At a high school graduation I attended many years ago, I remember them reading Love You Forever, a children's book by Robert Munsch (LINK).

I remembered this being a truly sweet, touching story about the deep, abiding love a mother has for her children.  And on many levels, it is.

And on other levels, it's super-creepy and stalkery.  And I say this as a mom who loves to watch her perfect daughter sleep.  It got all weird about four pages in.

The rest of this is pretty much going to be a spoiler, so go ahead and stop reading if you don't want to have the book ruined.  But, I mean, it's something like 18 pages, so really you should have read it by now if you haven't.  Anyway.

It starts with a new mother rocking her baby while it sleeps, singing to the child.  So sweet, we can all relate.  I love it!

Next she does the same to her two-year-old, who she earlier equated living with to living in a zoo.  But whatevs, it's still very sweet and I get it.

The mother continues doing this when the boy is 9, when he's a teenager.  She creeps into his room on her hands and knees, then takes the sleeping child/sullen teen into her lap to rock to sleep.  The clock in the shot with the teenager shows she's doing this at, like, 1:30 a.m.   Which means she is either staying up late enough to do this with this express purpose in mind, or she's setting an alarm to do it.  Either way, that crap just got weird.

So, let's assume it stops after he moves out, right?  Oh, no.  She leaves her house in her car in the middle of the night WITH A LADDER STRAPPED TO THE TOP, and drives across town to his house.  She puts the ladder up to the window, crawls into his room like a cat burglar, and does this:

See how you can see the ladder back there in the window?  Yeah.  That's not creepy AT ALL.  I assume Granny McWhitehair then ninjas her way back down the 15-foot-ladder, puts it back on the roof of her car all by herself (totally plausible, by the way), and then drives home.  

I'm not going to finish spoiling the book, partially because it's very sweet and I'd feel guilty about it, and partially because it seems like a rude thing to totally spoil it.

But, anyway.  Go ahead and buy this book for your child and read it nightly if you want them to check under their bed for you when they're 40.  Your call.