10 Reading Recommendations from Tiny Humans

The kids, as they are every day.

I’ve been so remiss with my kid-book posts here that we have a huge backlog of beloved books. Thus, this truncated version, in case anyone happens to have an almost-two-year-old boy and an almost-four-year-old girl who need to be distracted from the hypnotic, unending horrors that are the Dinosaur Train books (how do they always find those at the library anyway?).

Alton’s Top Five Books for Little Boys With Even Littler Attention Spans:

1) Snuggle Puppy. He loses his mind over this book, he really does. There is nothing cuter than an almost-2-year-old’s “Oooooh…I yuv oo!”

2) Bus Stop. Any book with a vehicle is good with this kid. But this one actually doesn’t make me want to scream. The illustrations are beautiful, with lots of things to find on each page. I mean, “yots.”

3) Brown Bear, What Do You See. Still.

4) Let’s Go For a Drive! Does he really get this book? I have no idea, but it does crack him up. “WAIT!” Maybe he just knows that Brooklyn kids are contractually obligated to love Mo Willems.

5) Mr. Gumpy’s Outing. Highlights: the goat and… the goat. Just the goat, actually.

Mr. Gumpy and the goat. And some other things, whatever, who cares GOAT!

Harper’s Top 5 Books for Precocious Preschoolers Who Adore Sitting Still:

1) Look… Look Again! We’ve only had this from the library for about 2 days, but Harper has declared it her favorite ever. It’s full of illustrated riddles that make her snort with laughter. Except the one where the pizza eats the chef. That one is scary!

2) Mary and the Mouse, The Mouse and Mary. I’m so glad to tell you that Harper has inherited my childhood love of stories about miniature creatures. This beautiful book is perfect for before you’re old enough for The Borrowers.

3) Jumpy Jack and Googly. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Harper laugh so hard at a book. (And no, she doesn’t find it all ironic that this book is about a monster who’s afraid of everything.)

4) The Snow Globe Family. Ditto. Tiny family sledding in a snow globe! What the what!

5) It’s a Secret.  If you love cats, and dressing up, and little girls having adventures (check, check, check), this is your book.

I didn’t even notice, somehow, that this book is also the work of John Burningham! YOU KNOW THE MR GUMPY GUY! How cute is it that the kids have each latched on to their own his-and-hers John Burningham books? I CAN’T STAND IT IT’S TOO CUTE

Happy Sibling Propaganda

The Adventures of Harper and Ollie in Prospect Park

A dear friend of mine just had her second child, and, as is already family lore, her older son gazed upon his new brother and welcomed him with a “No. No. No. No.” The mysteries of sibling relationships have been of particular interest to me, obviously, for the past, ohhhh almost 2 years I’d say. I recently met a grown brother and sister who were hanging out together, as they do every weekend, and I asked them their secret. They shrugged and said that their parents always told them it was important for them to be friends. Could it be that simple? Can you make your kids get along with each other?

Now, my children could not be more different in temperament. Every morning Ollie grabs his shoes and stands by the door and points and pleads, “Down!” The great loves of his life are going places, running, yelling, smashing things, kicking things, and trains and also trains. Harper’s favorite thing is to stay in her nightgown all day and to cry, when anyone goes near the door “I’m not going outside!” Left to her own devices, she prefers: sitting quietly and looking at books, sitting quietly and playing with paper dolls, sitting quietly and doing art projects. They do have some common ground in their shared love of jumping up and down, which I’m sure our downstairs neighbors find incredibly charming.

Just in case we have some say in the matter, ever since Ollie was born nary a fortnight after Harper’s second birthday, we have been waging a full-on assault of sibling-relationship information warfare. The thought is, if kids become what they are told, or even if any of it rubs off a tiny bit, might as well tell them over and over: “You are best friends. Brothers and sisters stick together. You are a team. Not only that, you are psyched to share a room. GO FAMILY!”

In this vein, we bombard them with the ruthlessness of communist USSR propogandists. I’m not talking about “there’s a new baby in the house” type books, most of which take a “and that’s a bummer” tack. I mean just nice models of nice siblings.

Books:

Harper still loves everything Charlie and Lola. (Saw the cartoon once, wasn’t terribly interested. But the books! Oh the books!) Siblings who share a room and are nice to each other. Check.  Big sibling looks after little sibling. Check check. So we assign Charlie and Lola studies at least once a day.

The Magic Treehouse books, which I mentioned in my roundup of chapter books, features a non-squabbling brother/sister pair who goes on great adventures together. Perfect. I like to throw a little notebook in a backpack and tell Harper she and Ollie are Jack and Annie and goodbye, have fun with the dinosaurs.

Runners-up: Max and Ruby, though Ruby is a bit bossy if you ask me. But Max, with his non-verbal, grinning mischeviousness, is a pretty good stand in for our own baby brother character.

Multi-media:

We’ve just discovered the Olive Us video series and are all pretty obsessed. These lovely, under-5-minute videos show an adorable family of 6 (!) siblings having sweet, wholesome fun together while wearing really cute clothes. Mountain picnics. Making cookies. Washing the car. The best.

Learning by Rote:

Adam brilliantly instituted a program called “The Adventures of Harper and Ollie on Earth.” This started off as a simple homemade binder to hold drawings we collaborate on, of adventures Harper and Ollie had, have, or may someday have, and has really taken off. Harper always wants to draw Harper and Ollie stories (sample quote: “Ollie! Get away! I want to draw a Harper and Ollie story!”), about, say, when they are grownups and live together in Manhattan, where it is fancy, and ride their scooters together to the café. Or else, when they go skydiving together, holding on to a rope that is taped to the sky. Now that she is starting to draw figures and faces herself this is even less work for us, and the result is a cuter-than-cute scrapbook of hypothetical sibling adventures dreamed up while one sibling was napping.

Any other happy sibling propaganda we should check out? We’re committed to making this life-long psychological experiment work. I’m pretty excited to meet them in Manhattan for lunch circa 2033.

 

The Read Balloon: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See. Again.

The first Read Balloon blog post I ever wrote involved then 19-month-old Harper’s then-obsession with Eric Carle and Bill Martin’s classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See. She loved it so much that eventually it physically pained us to read it. We were so sick of it we’d periodically hide it. The tune of the song-version of the book haunted our dreams. We suffered Brown Bear PTSD. And then, just when we thought we couldn’t move our weary mouths to read the damn book one single time more…the frenzy broke, and her toddlery obsessiveness latched onto another host.

Then we went and had another kid. And guess what? Ollie is currently in the throes of his first serious book obsession. And guess what else? IT’S FUCKING BROWN BEAR BROWN FUCKING BEAR.

This is a kid who never holds still. This is a kid who’d never sat through even the slightest board book before. Here are his other obsessions: Playing with balls (don’t snicker not that kind). Eating as many chicken nuggets as exist in the universe. Smacking things with sticks. Banging on things. Breaking things. Climbing things. Pushing the footrest over to the record player to climb up, hear music and also to break stuff. He likes to hug Harper until she falls down. He’s just a crazy physical baby-tot-person, with little use for words other than pointing and grunting or the occasional “NANA” if you’re not delivering a banana quickly enough.

So it’s really amazing to see Ollie dig through a pile of books for Brown Bear and then pick it up and bring it over and plop down in your lap and demand the book, grunting, “Bruh Beah!” over and over and over. Tonight at bedtime I had to actually remove the book from the room because he kept bouncing up and pointing to it. He would love nothing more than to rifle through it while nursing, which, I’m sorry, is just a little too much for me. I do want him to have pleasant associations with reading…but dude, I’m not a cup of tea.

So anyway, this book is amazing. Those big, simple, lovely, bright pictures. Those animals. The repetition in a way that feels a little like a game. And the summary at the end, that wonderful page where Ollie loves to point at each animal and name them. “Bruh Beah. Unh. Unh. Unh. Na-Na. Unh.” This book is somehow the perfect book for babies and toddlers. How did they do it? I imagine Bill Martin had some sort of underground laboratory in which he tested out possible stories on test-babies. Or maybe it’s Eric Carle’s vivid, blocky, child-hypnotizing hoo-doo. But this book has been two for two in our household. And this time, probably because my brain is more melted now after so many years of picture books, I don’t even mind reading it. Again and again and again and again. I’m just glad it provides a momentary distraction from all the climbing and shouting and breaking.

The Boy/Girl Bedroom

I keep meaning to post some beautifully set-dressed and well-photographed evidence of our new home. “Look at that sun-washed room with the casual vase of peonies just so, and that teacup which I hardly notice but which lends the whole image a subliminal coziness!” You would exclaim. But I don’t have time for any of this. I’m revising the novel in every spare instant and chasing Ollie down off the ceiling in every unspare instant. Anyway, so for now some iPhone pics of the kiddo room. I just think it’s a really cute little room, with its wacky, mostly accidental mix of patterns and the well-hung (snicker snicker) artwork arranged by professional art handler, Uncle Doug. Harper loves it, though she doesn’t understand why they can’t have bunk beds yet. (Because I’m mean, pretty much.) And the other day she got all teary, missing the silver stars in her tiny old closet of a room. Recreating those stars is actually on my to-do list. Number 947. Getting there.

I think we probably still count as a tiny kids’ room, though to us it feels huge. To have room to play! In the bedroom! How novel! They even have a closet, half of which is dedicated to clothes and books. We are living the life over here, people. Don’t even get me started on the elevator. Or the parking garage. Park Whope? Anyway. So behold: the room: as it actually is every day. (Imagine the sunlight, flowers, and achingly lovely photography. And tidiness, imagine some tidiness too.)

PS I wrote this post on my phone while kind of supervising Harper taking a bath. I’m such a good mom!

Spring Festivities and a First Birthday.

A year ago at this time I was basking in the unique glow of motherhood, swathed in the womb-like confines of a shared room at NYU Tisch Medical Center, toasting my new son with the endless ice waters the rosy-cheeked nurses kept bringing me. And/or, I was sitting in a paper dress all stunned, like, WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED? After miserable weeks of sort-of-labor, after reaching that too-pregnant psychosis where you start believe the baby is just staying in forever, after passing the due date and sailing on to the next week and infinity beyond, actual labor was so fast the kid was almost born in a taxi cab. And not to wallow in cliche here, but I can’t believe Alton King turns one today.

Ollie.

Likes: Harper, cheese, drinking from a glass, throwing a ball, walking around, slapping things.

Dislikes: clementines.

Skills: Walking, running, falling, getting up, climbing, falling, getting up. Can say Mama, Dada, Hapa, that, and cake.

Goals: Getting bigger than Harper by age 2.

We celebrated by chasing Ollie, as he has somehow come to be known, around various locales and pulling him down off stools, chairs, and tables. First, an adorable Easter egg hunt in the backyard of our new building. This building has just been charming me to death. All the kids! The shoeless playdates! Look at this shit:

Okay, so that was cute. At promptly 1 pm, both of my young combusted, so we went home (all the way upstairs) for naps, and then in the afternoon headed into Prospect Park. Harper had suggested some weeks ago that we go to the carousel by the zoo on Ollie’s first birthday and that she would make sure he didn’t get scared. So we did, and she did. She forgot, however, to make sure that she didn’t get scared. But she played through the panic and then afterward walked away uncertainly, saying, “Maybe that’s for when I’m older,” and “The brave ones get treats.” (?!) Ollie: completely unfazed.

And then some park frolicking, and a long stroll home, and then, of course: cake.

The 2-for-1-Special Springtime Birthday

One thing you have to admit for our family planning, we are really going to save money on birthday parties. Man, have we beat the system!

Last year I was convinced Alton was going to be born on Harper’s birthday, and so we had her tiny tea party a little early, but he had the good manners/laziness to be born weeks later. That was fun! I’m kidding, it was miserable! Anyway. So their birthdays ended up being two weeks apart, in different months even so they each get their own little sector of spring, but close enough that for the next few years anyway we can force them let them share a birthday party.

I decided a spring theme made sense, which meant some fake cherry blossom sprigs, some springy bunting, and two cake-foods. For the Harper side of things, dainty pink cupcakes with gum paste cherry blossoms that I lovingly crafted by hand. Come on, my kids eat nuggets every night. I ordered those suckers online. And for the Alton side of things, a chocolate cake that looked like mud, which is to say, slathered in chocolate pudding and crumbled cookies and gummy worms and slugs. For some reason, some of the guests found this to be off-putting. There was pin-the-tail-on-the-robin, but more importantly, tons of balloons. And that was it. We played records. We gave the grownups mimosas and bagels. Alton wandered around like a puppy, climbing into people’s laps and stealing their food. Harper occasionally reminded her guests not to take home her presents. Murray got shy at the last minute and stayed home with all his cats in Paris. It was really so much fun, and we felt so thankful to all the friends and new neighbors who came by, and very house-warmed and heart-warmed.

Here are some photos Adam took. And you can also get a peek at our new place, which we are semi-settled into. So without further ado, here is why is my novel revisions are not into my editor yet:

“I’m going to dream of Halloween”

I guess I’ve got a chip on my shoulder when it comes to kid Halloween. Every year I get annoyed that there are scary, inexplicable decorations everywhere, spooking Harper. (The other day at the children’s museum — “Why there’s a hand there, Mama?” “Oh, you know. Just a really fun severed hand floating in some fake formaldehyde as a hilarious joke. Whee!”) She also hates masks and face paint, although she did manage gather up the bravery today at playschool to get her nose painted pink. Then there’s the candy situation. Why would I want strangers to give my kid a bunch of terrible junk food I don’t really want her to eat at all? Why? And let’s not forget the costume situation, which just reminds me of what a non-crafty mama I really am. Maybe it’s the deep-seated costume-wariness of a bespectacled person. Glasses really make costumes impossible. I’m probably the only person in the world or at least Park Slope who wants Sarah Palin to jump into the Republican primary race — just because she’s a good costume for me, people, that’s it.

Still, over the course of the day I admit that my Halloween grinchiness was melted away. Harper was delighted with the morning’s costumes, invented by her: Charlie and Lola.

I was proud of her for this costume idea. First of all, it’s literary and almost entirely unrecognizable by the general public, and thus, my kind of costume. Second of all, it included her brother, which melted my Halloweeny heart. Third of all, it was easily thrown together, consisting of normal and rewearable clothes. I mean, am I an unfun Mom or what.

This costume was perfect for the morning at school — after all, it’s just clothes. And Harper really really liked pretending to be Lola all day. She demanded a lot of pink milk, addressed me as Marv or sometimes Minnie, and got into zany mishaps with an invisible Lotta. Good times!

But a few weeks ago a desire to also be a fairy princess was expressed. What IS a fairy princess? How does she know about them? I don’t know. All I know is, I placed an order with the brilliant Halloween seamstress that is my mother and a few days later a sweet, diaphanous, sparkly fairy dress arrived in the mail. Tiara, wings, and wand were obtained. Alton was squeezed into Harper’s old monkey costume.Costumes #2 were in full effect for evening.

Harper of course refused to wear the fairy princess getup. At trick-or-treating time we made our way out onto the street, Harper dressed as a cranky 2 year old who needed a nap. (A very convincing ensemble, I have to say.) But the magic smoke bubbles at the bakery across the street and hordes of costumed kids changed her mind, as did our accidental trick-or-treating on the way to her friend’s house. “Why he is giving me candy?” Harper kept demanding.

Finally we met up with Malka, her parents, and Adam. As usual, Malka and Harper whipped each other into a frenzy of giddiness, and soon Harper was racing around in her fairy princess costume which was good so I didn’t have to freak out on her about demanding it. The girls loved trick-or-treating, monkey-Alton fell asleep in the carrier, and the grownups got to feel charmed by brownstone Brooklyn in all its neighborhoody glory.
In conclusion… tiara+lollipops=really impressively tangled hair.

The Read Balloon: Peter’s Chair

“Harper, what’s your favorite book right now?”

“Peter!”

“Really? Peter’s Chair, the children’s classic by Ezra Jack Keats, who innovatively used collage and introduced multiculturalism into children’s literature?” *paraphrased

“Yeah.”

“What’s your favorite part?”

“I like when he reaches up.” (On the first page, Peter is building a very awesome block tower.)

“What else?”

“I like when his mama looks out the window. What’s he doing? There’s the picture of him as a bigger baby.”

“Yes. Pretty cool book. It’s about having a new baby in the house. We have a new baby, don’t we?”

No response.

“His new baby Susie is kind of like our Ollie!”

“Read it again. “

And there you have it.

Did everyone else know that Ezra Jack Keats was a Jewish white guy from Brooklyn? I didn't.