City-centric toddler books and other good kid reads

Nearly a year ago, I came across this useful post by a local mom about good city-centric books for toddlers. They provide a nice contrast to the typical farm and country life themes that seem to dominate a lot of kids books, and which I realized are only relevant for us when we take Ava and Dylan to fairs, petting zoos and harvest festivals around the region.

Although I spent my first couple years and many summers on my grandmother's farm in rural Louisiana and enjoy the open space, fresh food and other benefits of country living, I've grown up in a major metropolitan area and love it here.


The article is linked below and I pulled out summaries of the books mentioned, plus a few others mentioned by parents in Amazon.com reviews as good toddler reads. I’ll be checking the library and now Barnes and Noble NOOKkids online bookstore for them soon.

We’ve pretty much run through the many books in Ava’s library and are searching for new, more “mature” additions. To liven things up last summer, we started leaving off the last word in rhyming favorites like Goodnight Moon so that Ava could fill in the blank or elaborate.

Natasha: “Goodnight comb. And goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight…”
Ava: “Mush! Like oatmeal. I loooove oatmeal.”

Now she's memorized favorites like most of the Ezra Jack Keats books and the Paperback Princess (my personal favorite) and she "reads" them to us, word for word. It's still amazing to me, but not surprising I guess after I read this Wisconsin Council on Children and Families PDF that found:

...advances in neuroscience have helped crystallize earlier findings, bringing new clarity and understanding to the field of early childhood brain development. Children are born ready to learn. They cultivate 85 percent of their intellect, personality and skills by age five. The first months and years of life set the stage for lifelong development...

Research shows that the richness of a young child’s verbal interactions has a dramatic effect on vocabulary and school readiness, with differences correlated to socio-economic status. A watershed study on the topic found that by age 3, the observed cumulative vocabulary for children in professional families was 1,116 words; for working class families it was about 740, and for welfare families 525.

Fascinating. And no parental pressure, right? ;-) But it just reinforces the approach I gravitated to with Ava and Dylan from the start: I talk to them using big words and concepts, even if they don't understand them now. It introduces them to new words, and in some cases, provides an opportunity to explain more advanced concepts in kid-friendly language.

Which is why Ava was using the word "awesome" in the proper context at 18 months, and now describes her brother as "mischievous," and tells us when she's "frustrated." Sure, she also asked when we would see "Appetizer" again. "Do you mean 'Avatar'?" I asked. "Oh, right," she said with a smile. But she's clearly absorbing many of the words we use with her every day.

11 month old Dylan, who is not as engaged by books at this stage as Ava was, simply sits still for four to five pages before doing his baby Hulk impersonation: "Hulk no like book! Hulk throw book, find noise. Hulk like noise!"

I'm looking for more tactile titles for him. He's clearly absorbing the torrent of words too, focusing intently as we say the word for each facial feature he points to. But he is much more physically adept than Ava was at the same age. The following titles look promising for him and Ava.

City-centric reads: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005735.html


Also, Max Makes a Million by Maira Kalman

Max is a New York dog, but his dream is to live in Paris and be a poet.

"More More More," Said the Baby by Vera B. Williams

A trio of multigenerational, multiracial "love stories" about three pairs of babies and their grown-ups.

Ten, Nine, Eight by Molly Bang

It's sort of a "Goodnight Moon" tale, but interesting. The book combines your average counting book (or, in this case, counting backwards book) with a bedtime sleepy story as an African-American girl and her father count down to bedtime.

Can you recommend any that have become favorites for toddlers and preschoolers you know?

Post-Thanksgiving thanks

Thanksgiving itself was fairly low-key since we didn't host this year. J. did do his usual bang-up job of cooking several salmon fillets to accompany the turkeys, ham, mac and cheese, green bean casserole, stuffing, yams, potatoes, and copious desserts his mom provided. It was a lot of food but still scaled back from previous years, mainly due to my mother-in-law realizing that doling out or storing the leftovers was becoming as much of a chore as cooking it all.

So this year, the word of the day was moderation. For the first time in many years, my eyes were not bigger than my stomach and I did not over-indulge. It made for a much more enjoyable evening to not have to lay on the couch moaning with a Pepto-Bismal-stained upper lip. I simply had two plates of small samples of everything I wanted and didn't eat any dessert since I was already full. Then I packed leftovers and the desserts to take home for the next day.

My parents and I made the rounds to different relatives, so I didn't see them on the actual day. But I did see my mom's brother and sister and my cousin, as well as my husband's family, where Ava and Dylan spent hours playing with a passel of cousins, leaving them giggly and worn out by the end of the night.

Altogether, despite the cold snap we are recovering from, it was a lovely day. So I am thankful for moderation and health for myself, for family and friends, for a happy, healthy husband and kids, for a job, especially one that I enjoy and that allows us to have food in our stomachs, clothes on our back, and a roof over our heads. Which is what I give thanks for every night.

I am well-educated, self-sufficient, healthy, and I live in a developed country, so there are innumerable things for which I'm thankful and I often preface some minor annoyance with "Caution: first world whine ahead..." to make clear that I know I've got a lot working in my favor when I wake up every day (waking up: something else to be thankful for!).

But I will be striving in the coming weeks to keep that 'attitude of gratitude' as some say, as we head into the next year.

A Nook Color Kid at play

Happy Thanksgiving! While we finish cooking and Dylan naps, Ava's having a kid's book read to her by the Nook Color, or rather, an actor/reader. She's already got the swipe-to-turn-the-page figured out since it's like her dad's iPhone.

I'm digging this thing more and more, even though the wi-fi isn't connecting again. I'll try it out at a public wi-fi this weekend.

High tech hallelujah

I was off today and spent time hanging with the family and trying to stave off a cold that has made it's way from the kids to J. and finally to me (maybe). I also continued my quest to make my new Barnes and Noble Nook Color work.

And like Dr. Frankenstein finally seeing his monster lurch off the surgery table, tonight I uttered, "It's alive! Alive!"

It took two days, two calls to Nook tech support, one call to my router tech support, two calls and one visit to my local Barnes and Noble, and at least three hours spent rebooting and reconfiguring my wireless router and attempting to connect the Nook Color to my home wi-fi.

All while intermittently entertaining, feeding, changing, wiping and playing with the kids. I even got outside with Ava and the dog to frolic in the snow for a bit while Dylan napped.

Man: and I thought I could multi-task before I had kids. 

Despite the hassle of calling, rebooting and such, as I've shown before with my lost luggage saga in '07, persistance pays baby! I finally got the Nook Color working.



Then it stopped. Now it's back. Basically, I've had to use my laptop to log in to router and reboot every time I want to connect the Nook Color to my wi-fi.

It may be due to my ancient router (2004), but I've found a few message boards on Barnes and Noble's site that indicate others have had trouble getting the Nook to connect to wi-fi too. Since every other device in the house connects to the wireless just fine, I'm not upgrading until it dies.



This is from my Nokia E71 cell phone camera.
Seriously, I could hire a courtroom sketch artist and get a better image. SO frustrating.



I downloaded an e-book, a kids book, and several trial magazines and newspapers to give them a spin, including GQ. Which is what Mr. Skeptical of E-readers there is kicked back reading so comfortably.

His verdict? "This thing is pretty hot."

Oh reeaaallly?! You, my man, are preaching to the choir. So hallelujah to that.

Snowbound but no nookie

Seattle is currently in the grip of a winter storm that would make a midwesterner snicker (2"-5" of snow, wind gusts of 20-40 mph, dry, clear). But with our watery surroundings and hilly topography, the packed snow quickly turned to ice, making bridges and many streets impassable ice rinks of abandoned cars and gingerly manuvering buses.

The last time we dealt with a similar storm, I made it to work but spent hours trying to get home, only to abandon my car and hike uphill in the snow in the darkness. Thanks to the magic of telecommuting then and now, I only made that mistake once after realizing that with VPN and a laptop, I'm at my desk no matter where I'm sitting. So I worked from home the last couple days, slogging through long-overdue email tasks and working on 2011 goals for my team and myself.

My husband was able to get out and about before the storm hit on Monday to take Ava to school and pick up a birthday present that I'd finally settled on: a Barnes and Noble Nook e-book reader. Yes, it's as cool as the reviews say and as an early-ish adopter, I felt confident that this second generation Nook (the first was e-ink/black and white) would be sufficiently bug-free and worth the price. Also, I told my husband it would finally allow me to eliminate some of the hardcopy magazine subscriptions that he feels clutter up the joint. Personally, I see reading material as another type of art, not just something functional.

Having mentioned before my wish for a particular e-book, I was excited to get my mitts on this new reader. My husband handed me the package with a perplexed look. "It's just another device to bury your face in. I don't get it, but if you like it, great."

"You'll see," I explained, reverently snapping the device into the leather cover. "It's the future of content access: newspapers, magazines, kids books, the web, and more!"

I excitedly booted up the machine, watched the introductory video, and tried to set it up by accessing the web. Over and over and over again. Seems the machine could see the wireless in our house (and about 10 others: that's so Seattle), but couldn't lock on.

Tech support was closed, so I turned to the internet. Nothing but glowing reviews and hands on demos. I spent a couple hours after putting the kids to bed tinkering with our routers, my cell and laptops (which could all get online through the wireless fine).

I tried again over lunch, finally reaching tech support who showed me how to hard reset the Nook. Still no dice.

One of the things I've missed tremendously since having kids is time to sit and read. I remember those weekends as DINKS (dual income, no kids) when we'd hole up watching TV while surfing the web or reading magazines. Or sitting in coffee shops for hours doing the same, minus TV. Man, that was 3.5 years, two kids and seemingly a lifetime ago.

Unless I stay up way too late, my reading for pleasure consists of e-mail, texts, blogs, and newspaper

 sites I skim in my phone's  RSS feed. I was looking forward to the Nook Color changing all that, plus giving me another way to spend time with reading material with the kids (there's a NookKids component for downloading kids e-books read aloud by real people rather than an automated voice).

Of course, I can do that without an e-reader. Thanks to our nightly reading sessions before bed, Ava has memorized multiple books that she "reads" to us some nights. Ezra Jack Keats' stories are on heavy rotation, as is the Paperback Princess and Franklin is Lost.

But I was really looking forward to this next generation of reading with my next generation. I will be taking it in to exchange it for a new unit as soon as the icy roads clear.