Girls just want to draw fun
My daughters draw the cutest things: Stick-figure women in triangle dresses, bulgy-eyed cats and larger-than-life flowers. Nothing could improve on what they dream up which is why I love artist Carla Sonheim’s new coloring book simply called, girls. Instead of...
A Book for Those Days When Nothing Will Get Your Kid to School. Or Gymnastics. Or a Playdate.
I picked out Bear Feels Scared by Karma Wilson from the library after my daughter started complaining she didn’t want to go to school again. She missed us during the day. She wasn’t sure about the bigger kids. Her teacher was on vacation. So we set out on...
Olivia the Pig has got nothing on Olivia the Ox
As you’re looking for an inexpensive one-size-fits-all baby gift for all those friends of yours having kids this year, consider The Year of the Ox, the fourth children’s book in the wonderful Tales from the Chinese Zodiac series by Oliver Chin. Since my...
Adventure, True Love and Seafood
We hosted 16 relatives (seven in our house) over the long Thanksgiving weekend. My job, besides cooking some stuff, was to read to the four little children in my daughter’s room each night before bed. And each night we read The Sign of the Seahorse: ...
A Very Merry Pop-Up Christmas
With my husband-the-pilot’s schedule always up in the air (literally) I’m often RSVPing to our neighborhood parties and kid’s gatherings at the last minute. Still, I don’t want to show up empty-handed. So when I find a great holiday...
A Fairy for all Seasons
It’s always nice cracking open some children’s books to get your kids into the spirit of the holidays, but not every parent is looking to do it through biblical tales or the Santa story. A cool alternative: Positive Spin Press offers three fairy...
Good news for the immature among us (ahem)
While I submit that no one in their right mind gives a kid a harmonica–even with a how-to book–I got the chance to poke around the Klutz site recently and there are definitely some cool new options from one of my favorite childhood mainstays. My favorite...
The only thing cooler than giving kids books for Christmas – giving kids personalized books
As I read my own childhood picture books to my daughter, I also read the handwritten dedication penned on the first page of most of them. To Rita, on her third birthday, from Mommy and Daddy. To Rita, from Grandma and Grandpa. But of course that was long before...
BookSwim – Like Netflix for books
I used to collect books the way other people collect whatever it is they collect, but since having kids, my book-buying budget has been re-allocated to board books, and a trip to the library means sitting in a circle for story time. Then I found BookSwim, and I cursed...
Jamie Lee Curtis’s children’s books give me another reason to be jealous of her
Like it’s not cool enough that she’s married to Christopher Guest and has started in A Fish Called Wanda, and exemplifies the phrase “hot mama”–now Jamie Lee Curtis has an entire children’s book library to her name, and...
To the moon, little adventurers
It’s really nice to see a different kind of illustrator lend her talents to childrens clothes–one that seems more suited to a Caldecott winning book than a local flea market with the table between the funnel cakes and the guy with the batteries in the...
