New Baby Train

Here's one for my friends who are about to welcome new babies.  (Charlotte just read this to me last night).  Where do new babies come from?  Why the new baby train of course!  Gotta love those Marla Frazee pictures!  And I love the image of a train carrying all those bald-headed babies to their new homes.

New Baby Train

Woody Guthrie

pictures by Marla Frazee 2004

Bright and Early Thursday Evening

Something for a Thursday...

Bright and Early Thursday Evening

Audrey and Don Wood 1996

A very mixed up rhyme full of silly contradictions.  I can't say that I love the illustrations (they feel very dated to me) but we had fun finding all the opposites in the verse.

The Sea-Thing Child

The Sea-Thing Child

Russell Hoban

illustrated by Patrick Benson 1999

A remarkably beautiful story by the author famous for the Frances books.  A sea-thing creature has washed ashore and lives in fear of what he is and where he can go.  He befriends a fiddler crab and builds a little pile of rocks to hide in.  But little by little he is drawn to the immensity of the ocean and the sky and learns just what glorious thing he was made for.

The wind was howling, the sea was wild, and the night was black when the storm flung the sea-thing child up on the beach.  In the morning the sky was fresh and clean, the beach was littered with seaweed, and there he lay- a little black heap of scales and feathers, all alone.

He saw a fiddler crab waving his fiddle and shouting, "Oh, oh, oh!  If only I had a bow, what music I could play!  Walruses and great green turtles from the trackless deep would gather to the sound of my fiddling, yes."

At night the sea-thing child felt more and more restless.  He looked at the stars, and when he closed his eyes, he went on seeing the stars in his mind.  He could not sleep unless he was facing a particular star that burned and flickered over the sea, and when he slept he dreamed of wind rushing past him.  He dreamed of the ocean too, black and heaving in the night, sometimes under him, sometimes over him.  He would run along the beach in the dark, cheeping to himself, then he would come back to his circle.  And every night before he went to sleep he drew a second circle around the first one.

Hilary Knight's The Owl and the Pussy-cat

Hilary Knight's The Owl and the Pussy-cat

based on the poem by Edward Lear 

illustrated by Hilary Knight 1983

While I love Jan Brett's version of Edward Lear's most wonderful poem, Hilary Knight's illustrations will make you swoon.  He tells the poem twice through a jovial character who lives in an amazing house with his pet monkey, Arabella.  We have to linger on every page to take it all in.  Two children, Otto and Polly have wandered in and as the poem progresses, they gradually morph into the titular characters.  Knight is at his fanciful best!

A Sound Like Someone Trying not to Make a Sound

A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound

John Irving 1998

I've actually never read any of John Irving's books.  In the introduction, he explains that the origin of this book came from a character from his novel A Widow for One Year who wrote children's stories.  A German publisher convinced him to publish one and so A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound came out.  

The title is fantastic and perfectly describes that creepy curious feeling of waking up in the middle of the night to an unexplained sound.  And so Tom wanders through the house in the dark telling his father that he heard something, like someone pulling the nails out of the floorboards under the bed.  It was a sound like a dog trying to open a door.  It was a sound like a ghost in the attic, dropping the peanuts it had stolen from the kitchen.

First Mothers

First Mothers

Beverly Gherman

illustrated by Julie Dowing 2012 

I have never seen a book with this subject before.  A biography not of all the American presidents, or of their wives, but rather their mothers, perhaps the most invisible, forgotten and yet instrumental women behind such men.  As a whole, the book is fascinating.  Each president’s mother was as different and varied as the presidents themselves.  Some came from poverty, others from high class, some had fierce tempers, and some were fiercely religious.  Few were educated (a result of the eras they lived in) and many didn’t live long enough to see their sons become president .  Gherman gives them titles like "the brave mother", "the working mother", "the striving mother".  I love that the biographies are about them as women- their dreams, their plans, their background, and really treats them as worthwhile to learn about, not just in the context of their presidential sons.

George Washington's Teeth

George Washington's Teeth

Deborah Chandra and Madeleine Comora

pictures by Brock Cole 2007

A little late for Presidents day, but a good one at anytime.  We all have heard the story of George Washington’s wooden teeth, but Deborah Chandra and Madeleine Comora tell the real history of our first president’s dental woes.  Plagued by tooth loss and decay, Washington gradually lost all of his teeth even in the midst of leading our country to independence.  Aided by a trusted dentist, he gradually fashioned pairs of dentures.  Although remarkably ingenious with springs and tiny screws, they were limited by the technology of the time and often caused him great pain and humiliation.  The book conveniently provides a timeline of Washington’s life (and tooth loss) and includes some pictures.  I was left with an even greater respect for the man who accomplished so much while enduring such suffering.  And it made us want to be more vigilant with our dental hygiene!