With the discovery of our impending baby we have been rushing around getting ready for parenthood. We’ve read (and are continuing to read) books about pregnancy and labor, we are cleaning the apartment to transition our second bedroom from storage to nursery, I’m sticking to a proper diet and exercise plan, my husband is scooping the cat litter, and we have been to the doctor for several appointments and are scheduled for the next visit in May. None of these things have been particularly fun. Interesting, but not fun. Necessary, but not fun. So I’ve decided that the next thing I do that is baby related is going to be fun!
Since we don’t know the gender we haven’t really started thinking about nursery themes or anything yet, but the baby will be read to every single day no matter what the sex which means it is book shopping time! I dug up some books from my childhood that will be useful and some that will have to be thrown out (why did my parents decide Little Black Sambo was appropriate reading material for their child?) and I purchased a couple of books today for the kiddo but I want to make sure I have all the essential books on my list of books to buy.
What are the classic children’s books that a proper collection should not be without? What are some not-so-classic but nevertheless amazing books that should be on the shelves in the baby’s room?
Classic:
-Goodnight Moon (I have a pet theory that this book has been read cover-to-cover more times than any other book in human history)
-Others by Margaret Wise Brown–she’s a little weird, but our daughter enjoys her.
-Sandra Boynton is moving into classic territory
-Dr. Seuss, especially The Foot Book and his other easy readers.
Awesome and new:
-Mo Willems will be a classic eventually, no doubt.
Really, though, my suggestion would be to browse the cardboard book aisle, find books that YOU wouldn’t mind reading a bajillion times, and buy them.
Here’s a few tips I’ve learned in the past 18 months or so since I’ve been bombarded with babies in my life:
While you want to read to your kid every day forever, you won’t until they’re at least 6 months old or older. This is ok and does not make you a bad parent.
When you do start reading, you’ve only got a couple of months until the kid has the motor skills to start grabbing at the book. Neither of you will have fun doing this unless you are reading a board book.
Shortly thereafter the kid will start reading the books itself. Or rather, trying to rip the books apart (a baby does not know how to daintily turn a page), throwing them and standing on them (this is not just bad kids, this is every kid). Once again you will be very sad unless these are all board books.
Books are fucking expensive. Super fucking expensive. And - see above. But they are free at the library, and $.50 cents apiece at garage sales and rummage sales. Do not buy books if you really don’t have to, because diapers are fucking expensive too and un-used diapers are better than un-used books.
Tell whoever organizes your shower to include a note about bringing a book for the baby, with their name and a note to the baby inside the cover. Put all the books in one spot and someone chooses one at random. The giver gets a prize. You end up with lots of great books - either ones the giver loved as a kid or that their kids loved.
There’s no harm in buying the few books you loved as a kid for your kid. They will not turn to stone if they don’t have the latest and greatest.
Make sure you have plenty of book storage because you will buy a million books and people will gift you a million more. Every time I visit my niece (like once a week) her book collection seems to have doubled. And it all appears to be on the floor. And she is standing on them.
Anyway…books for kids are awesome. But getting too into the books before the baby is old enough to get into books (and they WILL be INTO books!) is sort of a let down.
Words from an auntie who has spent about $200 on books that haven’t even been looked at yet because I didn’t know the ins-and-outs.
I’d like to suggest The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and Mama Do You Love Me? by Barbara M. Joosse. I read these to my newborn and they always make me cry (in a nice way).
Thumbs up Sandra Boyton books, too! They’re super fun and the pages are just about impossible for grabby little hands to tear out.
Never underestimate the power of reading to even the tiniest of infants. Reading aloud to children helps their brains develop, and introduces the letter sounds they will need for talking. Children who are read to regularly are better communicators, are more prepared to enter school, and have a better connection to their parent (assuming the prents is the one doing the reading.)
Anyway, board books are great for when babies start grabbing and tasting their books. Before and after, anything is fair game. If you teach your children to respect books, change them out or weed them out as necessary, then you shouldn’t have a problem.
My suggestions are *Pat the Bunny *by Dorothy Kunhardt, *Guess How Much I Love You *by Sam McBratney, *Put Me In The Zoo *by Robert Lopshire and *Hop on Pop *by Dr Seuss.
And while you are working so hard to do the best for the baby, make sure that once he/she is born you caress their head for a few minutes every day to aid in brain development.
If it makes you feel any better about Little Black Sambo, Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney did a collaboration of it called Sam and the Tigers. It’s everything wonderful you remember about the story, without all the racist crap.
You can save that one til a little later tho; it’s not in board book format, and is a little long for newborns.
Helpful hint for tiny baby phase:
Find and record yourself reading some really good short books, and then make a CD of them. When you’re dead tired with newborn, you can play the tape and feel better about your parenting without having to find and actually read a real book!
The science is pretty bad on such stuff: twin studies suggest that, unless your parenting style is really really out there (like beating your kids regularly), how you raise your kid has little long-term effect, so you may as well do the things that give you a good relationship with the kid. Rubbing their head to aid in brain development? That sounds pretty silly to me. Not that giving head-rubs is a bad thing, but rather that you should do it because the kid enjoys a good headrub.
As for Lasciel’s suggestion of the CD, sure–if it makes you and the kid happy, do it. However, if you’re doing it for brain development, even the shaky science showing linguistic improvements from read-alouds suggest the effect doesn’t transfer to electronic (even videotaped) readings: apparently the interaction with a human leads to short-term linguistic development in a way that doesn’t happen with something prerecorded.
I wasn’t going for brain development, I was going for lack of parental guilt development over the realization that when they have a newborn they most likely won’t be doing nightly storytimes.
IMO, no kid’s library is complete without Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. It’s a classic of western literature. It taught me how to read. It’s one of the bestest, most revered, most valuable books in all of existence.
Um, IMO, naturally. It *did *teach me how to read. It was one of those books that I loved so much I had Mom read it to me over and over and over and over. (Clearly, she’s a saint - I’m sure she hated that book pretty fast.) We quickly got to the point where I’d memorized the book based on her reading. One say, I was sitting by myself looking at the book and saying what I knew to be the story to myself as I turned the pages. And then the Eureka! moment came - I distinctly remember thinking, “that says Sam! That’s what that word is!” And page by page, an entire new world was opened to me.
I think your library idea is made of awesome. Luck to you.
When you move beyond board books and into pre-school stories, our favorites have been:
Dr. Suess
Margarate Wise Brown
Virginia Lee Burton (The Little House, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel)
Russel Hoban’s Frances books
Here in Tennessee, we’re fortunate to have the “Books from Birth” program which was spearheaded by Dolly Parton. You register your child when he or she is born, and then the child gets a free, age-appropriate book in the mail every month until their fifth birthday. That’s sixty books before age five! And the collection is really diverse. We had two kids in the program, so we would sometimes get duplicates which we would give away to neices and nephews.
My MIL laughed at me often for reading to my babies when they were tiny. “There’s no way they can understand what you’re saying!” she would reason. This is true. But I figured if they connected spending time with Mommy (way back when I was their favorite person in the world! ) and books in general, they would get a positive feeling about books. It’s worked, as far as I can tell. All three of mine are readers, at ages 23, 20, and 11.
IOW, when you’re talking about newborns, the book itself is not nearly as important as cuddle time with Mommy, and associating the loved sound of your voice and the loved smell of your body with books. Bright pictures help, because newborns don’t have good eyesight, so big, bold colors appeal to them.
When your baby gets a little older, s/he may enjoy ‘activity’ books, like flap books, pop-up books (these tear very easily; be prepared to replace often), books with textures (like Pat the Bunny), etc.
All three of mine had different favorites.
One thing you can be sure of: whatever your baby’s favorite book turns out to be, you will become sick and tired of it, and it will become more and more difficult to read it every nap time, and every bed time, with enthusiasm! But you’ll survive!
The favorite of both of my kids, and myself, is a fun book called Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. It’s got a great swinging rhythm which prereaders find fascinating and easy to sit still for, it’s easy on the voice, and it (at least at the time it came out) was fairly unique among alphabet books because it “stars” lower case letters, not capitals.
I recommend the original, in which the lower case letters are rescued by the “Mamas and Papas and Uncles and Aunts…” - the capital letters - at the end. There’s a board book version that ends halfway through the story, but I don’t like it as much.
My kids are 12 years apart. When I opened CCBB for the first time to read to my daughter, I found that I still remembered and loved most of the words!
a told b and b told c,
“I’ll meet you at the top of the coconut tree!”
…also, I’d add that very little ones don’t give a shit what you’re reading to them. It really is about the cuddles and Mama Time, and establishing the concept that the squiggles on the page relate to the words coming out of your mouth. Sometimes when they were wee, I’d simply read aloud whatever I was reading for me. Gave us good reading time, and I didn’t feel so resentful that I had less time for my trashy fantasy novels!
Excellent suggestions everyone! I am putting together a list so that when people start asking what we want or need for the baby we can give them the list and tell them to go nuts, and as a bonus we don’t end up with 50 billion stuffed animals that we have no space for!
We love the Sandra Boynton books…Great illustrations, quick stories and fun. My daughter likes Goodnight Moon (loves saying goodnight to everything), A Color of His Own by Leo Leonni, Peanut Butter and Jellyfishes (not sure of the author), the “Brown bear” (Polar bear, panda bear) animal books by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle. She LOVES the feelings books by Trace Maroney (they have a little rabbit who explains what he does when he feels happy, angry, scared, lonely, etc) and she’s a huge fan of The Remarkable Farkle McBride by John Lithgow.
She has about 100 books and I know we’ve read very nearly all of them to her at some point. She will be 3 next week. She likes most any book, but her favorite thing now is to ‘read’ them to us (usually using the pictures as clues and her memory of the stories from us reading them…the ones we read often she can recite practically verbatim). Good luck and have fun!
I’ll second Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom; recently, we were cleaning out a bedroom closet and came across mudgirl’s copy of this book. It was the one thing we found from her toddler-hood that she wanted to keep!
The rhythm of it is excellent, and the illustrations are engaging and fun.
) and books in general, they would get a positive feeling about books. It’s worked, as far as I can tell. All three of mine are readers, at ages 23, 20, and 11.