Review: Mommy, Mama, and Me

Here's our second installment celebrating Banned Books Week:

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Title: Mommy, Mama, and Me

Author: Lesléa Newman (website)

Illustrator: Carol Thompson

Publisher: Tricycle Press
Year: 2009
ISBN: 978-1582462639
Format: Board Book
Pages: 18
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 2.5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Mommy, Mama, and Me alternates telling what Mommy and Mama do for their young toddler over the course of a day.  They play and cuddle and cook and snack and read and bathe and (hopefully for the moms' sake) eventually sleep.  The toddler is delightfully androgynous, making it easy for any little girl or boy to step into his or her day.


Mommy picks me up, up, up
Mama pours juice in my cup.


Mommy, Mama and Me has of course qualified for review during banned books week due to its portrayal of a presumably lesbian couple.  The entire focus of both women is the child, and they're only rarely on the same page together, but the trio is clearly a family, and the love the women both have for their baby is clear.


I think it's important for every child to be able to find decent books about people like them and their families.  I know when Boo's a bit older I'll be doing my best to find books with accurately and positively portrayed autistic characters.  I also think it's important to expose Boo to books about people who are different from us; the more familiar something is, the less likely it is to be something to fear or disparage.

All that being said, while the rhyming text is cute, the pictures well done, and the message important, this would get pretty monotonous 15 times in a row, so I can't make myself give it a higher Adult Sanity Factor.


Boo is not overly interested in Mommy, Mama, and Me.  He's outgrown most board books of this simplicity, though he was happy enough to sit through it a couple of times, especially if I emphasized the page where Mama and the toddler go down a slide.   I think it would have been more of a hit about six to twelve months ago for its absolute content.  For the more controversial aspect, I'm not sure he understood that the two ladies were both mothers to the child.  For one, we're still working on the whole Mommy is a girl and Daddy and Boo are boys concept, so I'm not sure he gets that a man and a woman make up the average set of parents.  For two, we still use Mommy (what my husband and I call me) and Mama (what Boo calls me) interchangeably, so I'm also not sure he really gets that the book is portraying two separate women.  Many toddlers will be able to start having conversations about different family types before they lose interest in the other content of this book; sadly, Boo is not one of them.


If reading about a family with two dads is of more interest to you, Newman and Thompson also collaborated on Daddy, Papa, and Me.   While we haven't read that one, I imagine its quite similar, though the child looks like he or she may be slightly older.


Autism Spectrum Bonus:  Mommy, Mama, and Me goes through a lot of average every day activities like having a nap and playing in the park, so if your child craves reading about the familiar (while learning about something that may not be familiar), this is a good choice.  As I said above, the love both women have for the child and the child has for each woman is very clear and may help with discussions on expressing affection.  It's also a good starting point for reassuring kids that it's okay to be different and that different doesn't mean bad.

Bottom Line:
Mommy's glad a need is filled,
Mama knows Boo's not as thrilled.

Links:

Mommy, Mama, and Me at Amazon.ca

Mommy, Mama, and Me at Amazon.com

Review: At the Supermarket

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Title: At the Supermarket
Author/Illustrator: Anne Rockwell (website)
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Year: 2010
ISBN: 978-0805076622
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 32
Age Range: Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 4/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

At the Supermarket follows a young boy and his mom through a regular outing to buy food at, well, a supermarket, of course.  The boy narrates what foods they pick up and which ones he likes best.  It all culminates in him reminding his mother they need to pick up the ingredients for his birthday cake, which they of course do, promptly returning home to bake it.  Guess the trip wasn’t quite so mundane for the boy after all!

I saw this reviewed at Kidslit and thought it might be worth trying.  

It was.

Boo’s favourite part is the second page where “the door opens all by itself” is discussed.  He’s very big on anything that happens all by itself, himself, or herself right now, and magic doors are all the rage in his world.  He can talk about them for hours.  I’m not kidding.

This updated edition is illustrated by Anne Rockwell herself with help from her granddaughter.  I must admit to being a bit ambivalent about the results, but they’re certainly bright and colourful and get the idea of the products and setting across.  Boo has no trouble identifying the fruits and veggies, which he likes to point out while I’m listing each one.

I must confess that we actually substitute the term “grocery store” for “supermarket” while reading this, and thus that’s what Boo calls the book “Ah duh Groswy Doh”.  No one around here ever uses the term Supermarket, but it’s easy enough to change while reading, provided I’ve had some caffeine at some point to keep me quasi alert.  Good thing the boy and his mom buy coffee and tea!

Autism Spectrum Bonus: At the Supermarket is a great find for young kids on the spectrum, particularly those who crave routine and knowing exactly what is going to happen in advance.  While vague enough to apply to many countries and cultures (perhaps with a food/terminology substitution or two), it’s detailed enough to really give anxious kids an idea of what they can expect to happen at the store. It also introduces a wide variety of basic foods and household products; if your child enjoys the book enough, perhaps it may encourage him or her to try a food listed in it that they might otherwise be hesitant about.  The book also mentions that the little boy likes grapes best, while his mom prefers brown eggs, which might help you start a conversation about favourite foods and different preferences.

Bottom Line:

This book seems to open all by itself at the grocery store supermarket. 

Links:

At the Supermarket at Amazon.ca

At the Supermarket at Amazon.com

Review: Rhyming Dust Bunnies

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Title: Rhyming Dust Bunnies

Author/Illustrator: Jan Thomas (website)Publisher: Beach Lane Books
Year: 2009
ISBN: 978-1416979760
Format: Hardcover, also available in Paperback
Pages: 40
Age Range: Toddler, Preschooler, Early Reader
Kid Love Factor: 4/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Unsurprisingly, Rhyming Dust Bunnies is about dust bunnies that rhyme.  Well, three of them (Ed, Ned, and Ted) rhyme.  The fourth, Bob, doesn’t seem to be in tune with the others:

Ted: Hey! What rhymes with car?
Ed: far
Ned: jar
Ted: tar
Bob: Look!

The rhyming bunnies seem confused by this.  Ted even goes as far as putting a sympathetic (condescending?) hand on Bob’s shoulder and telling him “No, Bob... ‘Look!’ does not rhyme with car!”

Sadly, this doesn’t seem to help Bob, who each time the game is played answers with a non-rhyming interjection instead. 

For those of you above the age of toddlerhood, you’ve probably predicted that the others should be listening to Bob instead of telling him that he’s not rhyming.  Ed, Ned, and Ted do clue in when the ‘monster’ with the broom arrives, though it’s not enough in the end, and all four of our friendly dust bunnies end up getting an all-expenses paid tour of the inside of a vacuum cleaner.

This is how I know they’re not the dust bunnies in my house.  See, the vacuum doesn’t come out unless the queen (or my grandmother) is visiting...though we do have a small scary monster who sometimes waves a toy broom in the general direction of dust bunnies.

This book would be entertaining to toddlers, preschools, and beginning readers.  It’s certainly snort-worthy for adults.  Older kids will likely catch on that Bob is in the know rather than just bad at rhymes on page 2, whereas younger ones may take longer. 

I was surprised by how much Boo enjoyed this book.  Rhyming isn’t a concept we’d tried before, and I’m quite sure he still doesn’t really get it, but he enjoys the game of trying to guess whether a word rhymes with another word. 

He’s also really keen on the word “Thwptt!” which I probably could have predicted if I’d thought about it beforehand.

Autism Spectrum Bonus:   Apart from the lessons in rhymes, which kids with a fondness for word games will love, you might be able to discuss the emotions the dust bunnies are portraying; they have simple faces, but they’re quite expressive and go through a range of emotions.  Also, and this might be just me, but having read Temple Grandin’s quote (“After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire.”), I must admit that I can’t help but think of little blue Bob as possibly being on the spectrum, trying in vain to get his more social counterparts to focus on their surroundings rather than chat.

Bottom Line:

What rhymes with cute?
Lute
Newt
Fruit
Dust Bunnies!

Links:

Rhyming Dust Bunnies on Amazon.ca

Rhyming Dust Bunnies on Amazon.com

Review: Mommy Hugs

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Title: Mommy Hugs

Author: Anne Gutman

Illustrator: Georg Hallensleben
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Year: 2003
ISBN: 978-0811839167
Format: Board Book
Pages: 14
Age Range: Baby, Toddler
Kid Love Factor: 3/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Mommy Hugs shows various animal babies and how their mothers hug them on each spread of pages.

Mommy cat hugs her kitten with a nuzzle.

There are cats, elephants, monkeys, polar bears, swans, and parrots. It ends with the human narrator explaining how his/her mother hugs him/her.

Not only does this book give you the opportunity to snuggle with your child in a variety of ways, it’s also teaching that animals (at least some of them) also care for their families, and even functions as a vocabulary expander between the animal baby names (swans have cygnets, in case you’ve forgotten from elementary school) and the near-synonyms for hug.

Mommy Hugs is one of those books we read repeatedly for three days in a row before Boo forgets about it for months. I’m not sure if this is a function of his waxing and waning enjoyment of it, or simply because it’s a small book that tends to get lost behind his multitude of others. Not that small is bad; A) it’s nice a portable, and B) it goes missing often enough I don’t get too sick of it.

For the more male parents out there, there’s also Daddy Cuddles by the same creators. As we haven’t read that one I can’t speak about it directly, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it's pretty similar.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: This book gives lots of opportunity to indulge children who crave tactile sensory input. Luckily for us, for the most part Boo is a hugger/snuggler/crawls-all-over-mommy-and/or-daddy-er. For kids who are more averse to contact, it might be a way to try to explore various ‘hugs’ that might be less disliked than your average neurotypical’s standard offering. Perhaps a polar bear-like tickle would be better, or maybe a cat-like nuzzle or a monkey-like pat. Or something not mentioned in the book but that the book leads you to discover. We also found this book to be a great way to build anticipation in Boo’s early communication days. He soon learned that he’d get a tickle on the polar bear page and his grins and vocalizations as he waited for it were priceless.

Bottom Line:
Mommy readers hug their readlits around a book.
Links:

Mommy Hugs at Amazon.ca

Mommy Hugs at Amazon.com

Review: Lemons Are Not Red

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Title: Lemons Are Not Red

Author/Illustrator: Laura Vaccaro Seeger
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Year: 2004
ISBN: 978-1596430082
Format: Hardcover, also available in Paperback
Pages: 32
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

I saw Lemons Are Not Red reviewed over at Infant Bibliophile’s site. Since we’ve been trying for weeks to get Boo to solidly understand negation, I figured this would be perfect.

It so was.

The yellow opening page declares:

Lemons are not RED.

There’s a lemon-shaped cut-out which clearly displays a red lemon. But once you turn the page, the lemon cut-out is now over the yellow background, and the red former background is revealed to be a nice big apple.

Lemons are YELLOW.
Apples are RED.

The pattern continues through orange carrots and purple eggplants, pink flamingos and grey elephants, brown reindeer and white snowmen, green grass and the blue sky, and ends with the silver moon and the black night. Good night!

This was an instant hit. Boo loves naming colours, so I knew he’d be intrigued, but I failed to predict the height of toddler awesometude that this would be. Now everything is “not”. Car not pink! Duck not turtle! Which you’d think would be a bad thing, and maybe it soon will be (like when he gets to “Boo not hungry!”, or worse, “Boo not tired!”), but for now I’m pleased. As a nice bonus, he’ll now “read” it to himself, word for word, which is excellent as my threshold for the number of times this is good to read in a row is substantially lower than his.

I’m quite sure Boo has no idea what an eggplant is (because, um, BLECH!), but he knows that they're purple. I’ll have to locate one to show him next time we’re at the grocery store.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: Not too much beyond what neurotypical kids will glean from it. This one suited Boo in that it catered to his colour Special Interest and helped explain the "not" concept we’d been struggling with. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if the issue was due to his communication delay, or because I’d done a crap job of modelling. Either way, problem solved. Boo also find the cut-out and how it changes colour from one side to the other fascinating. I imagine it’d be just as much so for any highly visually-oriented kiddo.

Bottom Line:
This book is not AWFUL
This book is GOOD
Eggplants are AWFUL

Links

Lemons Are Not Red on Amazon.ca

Lemons Are Not Red on Amazon.com

Review: Rock-a-Bye Farm

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Title: Rock-a-Bye Farm

Author: Diane Johnston Hamm
Illustrator: Alexi Natchev (website)
Publisher: Little Simon
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-1416939213
Format: Board Book
Pages: 32
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 3/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Rock-a-Bye Farm starts off very normally with:

It’s bedtime.
The farmer rocks his baby.
When the baby goes to sleep...

Once the human baby goes to sleep, things get rapidly sillier:

The farmer rocks his dog.

And on the next page:

When the dog is snoring loudly...

Once the dog is asleep, he rocks his hens.  Once the hens are asleep, he rocks his sheep.  Et cetera.  The brightly coloured illustrations get progressively more humorous along with the text.  The farmer uses an apron to rock the hens.  He presses a hay bale above his head to rock the sheep.  He uses a door balanced on a wooden barrel to rock his cow and a hammock to rock his horse.  Once everyone is finally asleep, the farmer rocks himself.  Good night!

We’ve been using Rock-a-Bye Farm to both reinforce Boo’s animal sounds and to teach the concepts of loud (highly successful) and quiet (not so much).  On one spread of pages, when the farmer is rocking the cow, we yell “MOO!!”  On the next spread, when the cow is asleep, we (and by ‘we’, I mean me) whisper “moo”.  Rinse and repeat for the other animals.  Let’s just say Boo’s starting to get it, but it’s a work in progress.

I don’t think this will ever become one of Boo’s favourite books, but he’s intrigued enough to want to read it about once a day right now.  And while it’s unlikely to become one of my favourites either, it’s not one I loath to see approaching.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: As I said, we’ve been using Rock-a-Bye Farm to reinforce animal imitation and loud/quiet voices.  Older kids (i.e. ones with a better grasp of basic physics than Boo) may enjoy the visual humour of the farmer having to use elaborate methods to rock his various animals to sleep.  For those with fairly rigid bedtime routines, Rock-a-Bye Farm could be a good addition to story time, if the 4087^th rendition of Goodnight Moon is starting to wear you down.

Links:

Rock-a-Bye Farm on Amazon.ca

Rock-a-Bye Farm on Amazon.com

Review: Dig Dig Digging by Margaret Mayo

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Title: Dig Dig Digging

Author: Margaret Mayo
Illustrator: Alex Ayliffe
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Year: 2006
ISBN: 978-0805079852
Format: Board Book
Pages: 22
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Dig Dig Digging is full of the large vehicles that many toddlers love, complete with rhythmic, onomatopoeic phrasing.

Diggers are good at dig, dig, digging,
scooping up the earth, and lifting and tipping.
They make huge holes with their dig, dig, digging.
They can work all day.

The book goes through 10 different machines, from construction vehicles like diggers and road rollers to emergency vehicles like fire engines to service vehicles like garbage trucks. Each spread of pages describes the machine and what it's good at, then finishes with "They can work all day".

It's cute, it's catchy, it's...kinda irritating. It's also Boo's favourite right now. With lots of action words and sound effects, this book is practically made for expanding toddler vocabularies and imitation. Not to mention their recognition of vehicles. The illustrations are colourful and effective but not very detailed. True vehicle-lovers will likely demand more-photorealistic options, but Boo is thus far content and now very excited to see a garbage truck on the street, something he'd never before been interested in.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: The abundance of verbs is great for expanding language or comprehension, an especially nice bonus if you're struggling to introduce action words to a very concrete thinker. There's also lots of machine-noise words for encouraging imitation. Boo enjoys yelling out "They can work all day!" when I pause for him at the end of each page; it didn't take him long to work out the pattern. The brightly coloured pictures also include the people who are necessary for the machines to run, which might be good to point out to little ones who are normally too intent on fascinating vehicles to notice things as boring as people.

Bottom Line:
Dig Dig Digging is often repeating,
Pages turning, toddler grinning, vrooming and beeping,
Soon we'll be perfect at machine-like creaking,
We'll be reading all day.

Links:

Dig Dig Digging on Amazon.ca

Dig Dig Digging on Amazon.com

Review: A Cuddle for Little Duck

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Title: A Cuddle for Little Duck

Author: Claire Freedman
Illustrator: Caroline Pedler (website)
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-545-07797-2
Format: padded board book
Pages: 18
Age Range: Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 3.5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

A Cuddle for Little Duck was gifted to us for Boo’s first birthday, to go along with his ducky themed party. Since it was obviously chosen to suit the invitations we’d sent out, I didn’t have high-expectations of the story itself.


Turns out I was wrong. The whole family is quite fond of the book. As the mother of a toddler, it strikes a chord right from the opening lines:

The sun is up and so am I,
I’ve woken Mommy too!
I just can’t wait to start the day:
We’ve lots to see and do.

Oh, yeah. Being woken up at the crack of dawn. How well I know it.

A Cuddle for Little Duck then goes through how curiosity-driven Little Duck spends his (or her; the book is in first person and maintains gender-neutrality) day. Waddling to the river for a swim, running through the meadow chasing bugs, getting startled by a frog, resting with Mommy in the shade, playing games with other ducklings, waddling back to the nest, and finally snuggling up with Mommy to sleep until the new day starts.

The story is told from Little Duck’s point of view, with a simple yet well-executed four-line ABCB rhyming scheme on each spread of pages. The pictures are cute without being nauseatingly saccharine. They appear to have originally been oil paintings; each one illustrates the accompanying rhyme perfectly, and includes plenty of setting-appropriate background stuff to point to interested little people like ladybugs, wild-flowers, and fluttering moths.

Boo really enjoys this book, often waddling over to me with it so he can hear it again. So often, in fact, that I believe the whole story may have become a permanent fixture in my head. The kind of thing I’ll remember randomly when I’m 87, along with Hamlet’s soliloquy from Grade 9 English class and the lyrics to the German song Da Da Da.

Y’know, the types of things that’ll eventually convince Boo to put me in a home…

Autism Spectrum Bonus: The book describes everyday activities for Little Duck, many of which will be familiar or at least imaginable for kids on the spectrum. We've had good luck using Little Duck's experience with the frog to demonstrate and describe the emotion "surprised". And one of Boo's first obviously anticipitory gestures was throwing his hands up and attempting a "Hooray" when we arrived at the appropriate page. He'll also now wiggle along as Little Duck amuses his (or her) friends, as well as wish Little Duck and Mommy Duck good night when we get to the last page. All in all, the book has been a good platform for encouraging interaction with both the characters and whoever's reading.

Bottom line:

This charming book of ducky-kind,
A parent can enjoy.
Explore the day with Little Duck,
To please your girl or boy.

Links:

A Cuddle for Little Duck on Amazon.ca

A Cuddle for Little Duck on Amazon.com