Recent Reads...

The girls and I read A LOT!  Since I often get emails asking for book recommendations, I thought it would be a good idea to post a list of our recent reads every so often.  Most of our books come from the library, but I will occasionally buy a book, borrow one, or find one among our vast collection.

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Chasing Cheerios...The Book!

I turned my blog into a book using blog2print!  This is the first year of Chasing Cheerios, which I started when O was about 16 months old.  Now that E is 16 months old, I can easily find activities for her in the book (I'd much rather read a book than a computer screen).  I plan to make a book for each year of both of my blogs.  O has already said that she is going to use this book to find fun activities when she has children of her own!

So I Checked My Site Meter Tonight...

and I thought it was broken. My blog had 485 visits today!!! What! That's just crazy. I was sure it was broken or that I was reading it wrong, so I decided to check the referrals. The vast majority of the hits are coming from this link http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/scanimation Cool! If you haven't seen this book, you REALLY should check it out. Its truly amazing! We haven't read it since I posted about it in February, but I need to see if our local library will order it for us. It would be even better if one of O's grandparents bought it for her birthday... hint, hint :)

Mama's Milk

Sorry for another book review, but I wanted to share this beautiful book, too. Mama's Milk shows beautiful pictures of mamas (animals and human) nursing their babies accompanied by rhyming text. O loves to see the pictures and says "mulk" lovingly as we read. She especially likes the picture of the mama nursing the baby in bed while the daddy sleeps. Its a great book, especially for nursing mamas to read to their little nurslings :)

Vincent's Colors

O's grandmother recently gave her several books, and this is one of our favorites. The text is from Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother about his paintings. I love that O is being exposed to "real" art. She loves to label all of the people in the paintings as either "mama" or "dada." We enjoy talking about the different colors and objects in the paintings. She likes the paintings of flowers, and she likes to sniff them. Its a great book that we just wanted to share!

Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom

We have really enjoyed reading Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom this week. Its such a fun book to read. O loves to look at all of the letters on the pages before the story begins. The first time we looked at the letters, she quickly pointed to the Os and said "O." Then she pointed to the lowercase o and said "baby." She then pointed to the capital O and said "mama." The most surprising thing was when she pointed to the D and said "dada." I thought it was just a coincidence, but she points to the D every time we read the book and says "dada."

GALLOP! A Scanimation Picture Book By Rufus Butler Seder

Have you seen this book??? If you haven't, you need to! It is so very cool. Marg checked it out from the library and shared it with us this weekend. We are assuming that that Aunt Bobby ordered it for the library since she knows which books are the best! When you turn the pages the animals in the book move. O loves it and she tried to move like the animals when she was reading it. This one is definitely going on her Amazon wish list!

112 Books!!!

My mom and O read 112 books today!!! I was surprised when I called to check on them and my mom said that the only thing O wanted to do was read books (she's still recovering from an illness and the long day of traveling home from our recent trip), and they had read 54 books. By the time we got home, the number had more than doubled. Wow! O loves to read, but I didn't know she loved to read that much. My mom has lots of patience, but her throat is a little sore now. O and I usually read 20 to 25 books a day, and I thought that was a lot, but I guess I was wrong! Thanks, Mom for reading endlessly to my baby today!

Another Homemade Book

This is my favorite page.

I started working on this book for O about 3 months ago, but I got sidetracked by Christmas and just finished it. Its her favorite homemade book by far. I gave it to her yesterday afternoon, and we've already read it at least 15 times! Its based on a book by the same name that we checked out from the library that O absolutely loved. That book is based on the song by the same name. This is another book that we sing rather than read!

O's Favorite Books

O loves this book! (We read it over and over and over again each day). Anyone who wears or nurses their baby or toddler should buy this book! It tells the stories of families across the world who wear their babies. O loves to look at the pictures and identify the parents as mama or daddy. She especially loves the pictures of the babies in slings who are nursing. She says "milk" while signing "milk" and looks lovingly at the picture. She calls the book "mama." I realize that she's not calling me when she keeps saying "mama" while searching for the book on the shelf. Sometimes she calls it, "Mama Back." This is a book that we are going to be reading for a long time. Thanks, Grandmother for this wonderful book!
Another favorite of O's is Puff the Magic Dragon. This is another book that we read (actually we don't read this book, we sing it!) over and over again. She calls this book "Buff." The illustrations are beautiful, and it comes with a cd with 4 songs. Thanks, Aunt Bobby for this beautiful book!

Learning About Feelings

I thought that it would be fun to teach O about feelings using a book in which she is the star. I had a great time making a board book out of this book that I ordered from http://www.barebooks.com/. I was very happy with how it turned out, and I can't wait to make more books for her.