Children's Books

Karen Katz is Mira's favourite author these days. She creates books that are colorful, small and require active baby participation. For instance in, Where is Baby's Belly Button?, there are flaps that babies lift up to find eyes, hands, feet and the belly button.

Little Yoga by Rebecca Whitford and Martina Selway has nine yoga poses with wonderful illustrations using babies on one side of the page and the same done by an animal on the other page. The poses they illustrate are Butterfly (flying eagle), Monkey (forward bend), Lion (lion breath), Cat, Dog (downward dog), Mouse (child's pose), Bird (tree balance), Frog (squat) and Rest (savasana).

My Baby by Jeanette Winter is about Mali and the mud dyed cloth called bogolan. The author describes Nakunte's life through the preparing of the bogolan cloth. Mira did not seem to like the book, but I certainly enjoyed reading it and learning how important the cloth is for passing on traditions from mother to daughter.

Beach Party by Harriet Ziefert and Simms Taback has wonderful illustrations of Beach animals and the words are catchy and fun. For instance, "What kind of walking can you do today? Can you scoot like a crab, bend like a starfish, fly like a seagull looking for fish?

How do you make a baby smile? by Philemon Sturges and illustrated by Bridge Strevens-Marzo is another fun book to enjoy with a baby. It uses animals to show what they do to make their children smile. For instance Grin like papa crocodile, or like mama elephant wiggle your ear, or shake your horns like daddy dear.

And my favourite was Manneken Pis, a simple story of a boy who peed on a war. As told by Vladimir Radunsky. The book had colorful illustrations and was quite radical in that it was not polite like other books Mira has read. The central premise of this book was about a boy who peed on a war and all the people were so shocked that they stopped fighting and the country became peaceful again.