Wow, It's a Cow!

We had a lot of fun with Wow, It's A Cow! in the 18-months to 2-years range. It's a cute little book, but I wouldn't advise anyone to rush out and buy it. There's nothing particularly special about it. This is just a fun little romp that's easily interchangeable with a bunch of other, similar books.

Still, Charlie really enjoyed this one for several months. It seemed to have a lot of staying power for him. The story is about a farmer looking for his cow. He comes across lots of animals, but they are not the cow. Finally, on the last page, he finds the cow in the barn.

The amusement factor in the book is that on each page, the cow is drawn doing what some other animal does, and then you lift the flap and it shows the actual animal underneath. So the cow gets to pull a plow (horse), swim in the pond (duck), and perch on a tree branch (bird), among other things. Charlie always liked to lift the flap and announce the animal that was actually doing those things.

The book is also written in rhyme. "If it goes 'Neigh, neigh,' / And it's pulling a plow, / It's not a cow! / Of course, / It's a . . . horse!" These are relatively cute but uninteresting from an adult's perspective (except that I always wanted to rhyme a certain swear word with "duck" ...). The illustrations, too, are cute but nothing special.

It's a cute book for learning about animals, their sounds, and their jobs or characteristics. It's also fun as a lift-the-flap book and general entertainment. But it's not great literature.

Have You Seen Birds?

I do a lot of my children's book shopping at garage sales, so I am frequently dismayed to discover that some of my favorite second-hand finds are out of print. Thank goodness for used sales on Amazon, where you can find a copy of just about anything, because Have You Seen Birds? is just awesome. The premise is simple: A cat looks out the window longingly, describing all the different types of birds she likes to watch.

Since so many kids' books are written in rhyme, I've been thinking about when I should use the "poetry" tag on my posts and when not. I've decided it should be reserved for poems with some level of literary merit, and this book fits the bill. The text is a treasure trove of complex and hyphenated adjectives strung into a fun rhythm that reminds me a little bit of The Song of Hiawatha. Let me give you a taste:

Have you seen birds?
Long-legged tall birds,
tiny bug-sized small birds,
brightly breasted,
gaily crested,
meadow tan or fancy fan.
Have you seen birds?

. . .

Have you heard town birds?
Rapping-at-the-bark birds,
Cooing-in-the-park birds,
quarreling-in-a-rage birds,
tweeting-in-a-cage birds,
squealing, squawking,
screeching, talking.
Have you heard birds?

. . .

Look up -- see the sky birds,
flying-way-up-high birds,
racing-up-to-space birds,
wind-wheeling,
freedom-feeling,
diving, dipping, gliding, tipping.
Have you seen birds?

Okay, that was probably too much to quote, but I just love it so much!

The illustrations are also very interesting. They're all done with clay models, like a claymation movie. The detail is amazing, with individual feathers and little texture grooves carved in. Background details appear as well, not just the birds themselves. There are plants with flowers and berries growing, worms, insects, gardening implements, individual twigs in a nest, even snowflakes and flecks of foam on the waves.

There's no moral lesson here or anything, just a catalog of all the detailed variety of this one particular aspect of nature. Nevertheless, it's one of my absolute  favorites.

Puff, the Magic Dragon

The beauty of this picture book version of Puff, the Magic Dragon perfectly matches the beauty of the original song by Peter, Paul, and Mary. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it. The book comes packaged together with a CD of the song performed by Peter and his daughter Bethany, but I can't tell you anything about the recording because I bought this book used and the CD was not included.

The song has always made me cry a little bit, and this book did the same. As I've mentioned before, I'm a sucker for growing-up or cycle-of-life stories, and this certainly is one. Jackie has so much fun with Puff, and then grows up and stops playing with him. This book adds a happy ending to the story, though. The words are the same as in the song, but on the final chorus, the illustrations show a new little girl coming to play with Puff. The last page reveals a grown-up Jackie Paper peeking in on the scene, implying that the girl is his daughter.

The illustrations in this book are unbelievably beautiful. The front cover image really does not do justice to the illustrations, and Amazon doesn't have a look-inside feature for this book, so you'll have to take my word for it. They are stunning. The inside covers show maps of the land of Honalee. The pages are gorgeous fantasy paintings that combine realistic and fantastical elements to create the effect that you're truly seeing inside Jackie's imagination. There are many details and hidden elements throughout: fairies, buildings in the distance, rocks that look like faces. I haven't read the book enough times to notice even half of them, I'm sure.

This is quite a sad story, with a deep friendship breaking up as Jackie grows older, and I was a little bit concerned about presenting it to Charlie. And indeed, Charlie was upset when we first read it. He kept asking me why Jackie and Puff are not friends any more. We talked about it at length, discussing how Jackie grew up and dragons are friends with little kids, not grown-ups. I pointed out the little girl who comes to be Puff's new friend, and explained that Jackie is her dad. I don't think Charlie understands exactly what's going on, but he's not traumatized by it. He likes to point out the little girl's dad hiding behind the tree, but I don't think he makes the connection yet that the dad is Jackie as a grown-up. Still, Charlie requests the book frequently and loves the pictures and the song, and he will certainly grow into it.

I adore this book. It's very emotional for me, so it's difficult to explain exactly what I love about it so much. The story is sad yet sweet, the pictures are beautiful, and the song is a folk classic, but together these elements add up to something even more.

Good Dog, Carl

Good Dog, Carl is yet another one of our nearly-wordless friends. It's about a mother who goes out to run some errands, leaving her baby in the care of a large black pet dog, Carl, while she's gone. Carl and the baby get in all kinds of exciting but messy adventures around the house, but Carl cleans everything up and puts the baby back to bed before the mother gets home, so she is none the wiser.

The illustrations in this book are very realistic drawings, but often two scenes, or a before-and-after, are shown on the same page without any lines in between. I've noticed that this is rather confusing to Charlie, thinking that there are two dogs or two babies instead of understanding the time-lapse. That's exactly why Montessori advocates a single picture on each page at this age. Still, this is an interpretive skill that kids need to learn, and a wordless book invites lots of discussion, so I haven't found it to be too much of a problem.

Charlie enjoys narrating this book to me, much more so than his other wordless books. I'm not sure whether that's something inherent in the story, perhaps it's more familiar or easier to follow, or whether it's just that I introduced this book at a slightly older age than our other wordless books, so he has more ability and less history of being read to from this book. This is generally a fun book, but not one of our all-time favorites.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is one of those books that's so famous it's even written about in other famous books. (Anyone remember Ramona Quimby asking her teacher, in Ramona the Pest, how Mike Mulligan took bathroom breaks?) Since everyone surely already knows this book, why am I writing about it? Because it has really excellent economic and ethical lessons that deserve attention.

Here's the basic recap: Mike Mulligan is a steam shovel operator who owns his own steam shovel, named Mary Anne. They have worked together for many years on big, important projects. But times have changed, and now all of the major projects in the cities are being done by gasoline, electric, and Diesel shovels, not the outdated steam shovels. Most steam shovels are being sold for scrap, but Mike can't face doing that to his beloved Mary Anne. Then one day Mike hears that the small town of Popperville is going to build a new city hall, so he and Mary Anne drive out there and offer to dig the cellar, promising that the work will be free if they can't complete it in a single day. One by one, the residents of Popperville turn out to watch, followed by the residents of other towns. All of the spectators motivate Mike and Mary Anne to work very fast, and they complete their job in just one day. But they've forgotten to leave a ramp to drive Mary Anne out of the cellar! After some discussion, everyone agrees to let Mary Anne stay in the cellar, where she will become the furnace for the new town hall, and Mike is hired as the janitor.

This book can be read as having an anti-development bias. It displays a certain amount of sadness for the technological changes that have made steam shovels obsolete. But there is plenty to counter this, unlike in, for instance, The Little House, another Virginia Lee Burton book with a very strong nostalgia for old-fashioned country living. The first few pages of Mike Mulligan are aglow with praise for technological and economic developments. Mike and Mary Anne are proud of their work digging canals, cutting paths for new roads and railroads, smoothing out landing fields for airplanes, and digging cellars for skyscrapers in the cities. The only technological development they seem to dislike is the one that puts them out of work--the invention of better digging technology.

Perhaps Mike's affection for Mary Anne led him to make some poor economic choices. He could have invested in a diesel shovel instead of taking "such good care of Mary Anne she never grew old." But it can also make good economic sense to keep your capital equipment in good working order as long as possible. This being a children's story book instead of a corporate balance sheet, we don't have the necessary information to decide whether Mike made the right choices or not. But this makes a great discussion topic as your kids get older. And little kids can relate in the right context, too: should we repair this toy or buy a new, upgraded model?

Mike and Mary Anne embody the value of productive work. They are extremely proud of all the work they have done on important development projects. When they are replaced by newer equipment and can no longer find work, "Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne were VERY SAD." (In all caps, no less!) There's nothing worse than being unemployed and useless. Their solution is not to give up, but to prove how useful they can be in the right context. They head out to the small town of Popperville, where it doesn't make economic sense to hire a big diesel shovel, but a steam shovel can still be very useful. They like other people to appreciate their work, too. When they know they are being useful and entertaining to spectators, they work even harder and faster.

The solution reached at the end of the book is pretty much perfect. Even if Mike hadn't forgotten to leave a ramp out of the cellar, turning Mary Anne into a furnace might well be the best economic solution out there. There can't be too many places like Popperville left for very long--economic development will continue to spread from big projects to small ones--and traveling between far-flung little towns with a day's work in each is not likely to be economically viable for Mike and Mary Anne. If Mary Anne can function efficiently as a heating unit, why not? It provides steady, useful work. Mike and Mary Anne are both thrilled with the situation; nobody treats it as a demotion (though perhaps it's a form of semi-retirement, sitting around with visitors telling stories and eating pie every day). Certainly it is much more productive than what other steam shovel operators did, scrapping their machines or leaving them to rust. Mary Anne goes on to have another whole phase of productive life because she was so well kept up by her operator. Mike gets to continue working with Mary Anne, clearly important to him, instead of having to give her up for a different machine. The solution is not only efficient, it also makes everyone happy.

Overall, I think the theme of this book is not nostalgia and anti-development. It's finding a productive niche for yourself given your capacities and limits. Not all of us can be CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. Maybe we don't have the skills or capacity, or maybe we have other values, like family or leisure, that make other paths better for us. This book is about finding the work you can do, taking pride in it, and finding a situation that gives you the best life possible.

Blue Hat, Green Hat

There's not too much I can say about Blue Hat, Green Hat. We have enjoyed many of the Sandra Boynton board books since Charlie was a little baby, but they're just so simple that there's not much to say. Don't let the simplicity fool you, though. Boynton's books are excellent for babies and very young toddlers.

I chose Blue Hat, Green Hat to review today because it's enjoying a resurgence of popularity in the eyes of two-and-a-half-year-old Charlie. The story is extremely simple: A series of animals get dressed, one piece of clothing at a time, but the turkey always manages to put his clothes on wrong. Hat on his feet, socks on his hands, coat on backwards, that kind of thing. The only words are the color and name of each item of clothing, and then the word "oops" under the turkey each time. It's up to the parent and child to point out and explain what went wrong for the turkey.

This is a great book for learning colors and the names of items of clothing, but Charlie has those down like the back of his hand at this point. The reason he's interested in it again is that he can dress himself now and he just loves pointing out the turkey's mistakes and explaining what he should have done instead. Additionally, the words are so simple that Charlie can "read" the entire book himself. That is, there are no words other than what he can easily observe from the pictures and say out loud.  No parental involvement necessary! (Though he still likes to read it together with me.) I'm glad to see that this book has a bit of staying power past the infant stage.

Sunrise, Sunset

We received Sunrise, Sunset from PJ Library, an organization that provides free books to Jewish kids. I would wholeheartedly recommend PJ Library to anyone raising their kids in the Jewish religion. I recommend it with reservations to people like me, who want their kids to have a cultural connection to Judaism without pushing the religion aspect. PJ sends out one book or CD per month. We signed up for the baby level (under two years old), and over the course of the year, there were two books that I refused to give to Charlie because of religious or mystical content. The rest were straightforward explanations of Jewish holidays that we read but didn't love.

Sunrise, Sunset was one of the first books we got from PJ after graduating to the 2-3 year age group, and it's certainly my favorite book from them so far. It's the story of Motel and Tzeitel from Fiddler on the Roof, told in pictures accompanied by the words of the song Sunrise, Sunset. I am a sucker for happy cycle-of-life stories, and this one totally made me cry.

The religious content of this book is subtle and almost non-existent. There's nothing about religious beliefs or anything in the text. All of the characters are shown wearing religious dress, namely head coverings and tzit tzit. The Jewish wedding ceremony is shown and briefly described. One page appears to depict the discarding of bread before Passover, but it's not explained. All of these are elements that I want my kids to know about, and I like that they are presented mainly in the background to discuss but not as part of the actual story.

The illustrations are colorful and very expressive, and the characters are drawn to look very similar to the actors in the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof. Motel and Tzeitel are shown as children and then as young adults falling in love, then after their marriage Tzeitel is shown pregnant and then the couple with their new baby. Other elements in the illustrations also show the passage of time (A white kitten becomes old and fat. Tzeitel's parents appear to get older as well.). There is also a theme of sunflowers on almost every page, taken from the lyric, "Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, blossoming even as we gaze."

The words of the song are just as they appear in the movie or play, so they will be quite familiar. It's a sweet reflection on the passage of time and how quickly children grow up. The final page of the book prints the sheet music to the song, so you can play or sing along.

I probably would not have paid money for this book, since it's essentially the same content one could get from the movie. But I'm glad we have it. It would have been nice to take out of the library, I think. It makes the story accessible to a much younger child than the movie would be appropriate for. Charlie has certainly enjoyed reading it.