Books! Books! Books!

Books. Books. Books.

One of the fun things about having a baby means that one has a very good excuse to read children’s books. In college & grad school I used the excuse ‘I’m taking children’s literature’ to read children’s books. Then when I ended up in Academic Library I would keep up with them because ‘I need to make certain we have a children’s literature collection for our elementary education students’. But none of those are quite as much fun as ‘Boyo needs to be read to’.

Of course, one of the challenges of the under 1 is finding story books that are not TOO long to hold one’s attention and that have illustrations that are not too busy. Particularly in the first few months of life, high contrast images (I love Wee Gallery!) are supposed to be really good. With all of these things in mind, Kevin Henkes Kitten’s First Full Moon, was an obvious choice for reading. I had this book because I had started collecting children’s picture books focused around cats several years ago, and Kitten’s First Full Moon was the Caldecott winner in 2005, but it’s also perfect for the under 6 month set because the story is simple and the illustrations are entirely black and white. Boyo and I have read it several times and each time he’s been interested in the pictures and typically will stay quiet for the entire story reading.

So, in my quest for more books with simple storylines, and beautiful illustrations, I started looking at Henkes’ other books and found several that looked promising for the under 1 reader. Little White Rabbit and Birds came in from Summit today, and while they do not have the black and white illustrations of Kitten’s First Full Moon, the simple color illustrations are still gorgeous and the story lines are simple and fun as well and I can’t wait to read them to Boyo later on. I’m seriously considering getting Little White Rabbit for his First Easter Basket even though I was vaguely thinking of a Peter Rabbit theme… We shall see.