Summer reading

Miss M here. Did you know that I am 2 and 1/2 today? Mom's gift to me was the chance to guest post. I thought that some of the other 2 and 3 -year-olds out there just might be interested in what I've been reading since I turned two.* In fact, the Mayor recently emailed me wonderin' what books were in my beach bag. Besides, with all those Moms and Dads holed up with Harry Potter, a kid's gotta have something to while away the time. Without further ado, I give you:

The 100 Best Books I Read in the Last Six Months: 2-2.5
Legend:
* Canadian
+ poetry collection
bold my top 20

1. Madeline by Ludwig Bemelans
2. Madeline's Rescue by Ludwig Bemelans
3. Birthday Monsters by Sandra Boynton
   
4. The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown
5. Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown
6. Hand Rhymes by collected and illustrated by Marc Brown +
   
7. Silly Billy by Anthony Browne
   
--a good book if you're an anxious or even fearful child like me

8. One Gray Mouse by Katherine Burton *
   
--a lovely little counting book with clay illustrations
9. Ella Sarah Gets Dressed by Margaret Chodos-Irvine
10. Sometimes I Like to Curl up in a Ball by Vicki Churchill
    
--what's not to love about a wombat?
11. Tatty Ratty by Helen Cooper
    --little Miss Smartie Pants Mommy keeps meaning to write a review of this book and Cooper's other book, Pumpkin Soup that made my toddler list. Can I just say that I want Helen Cooper to adopt me? That's how much I loved these books. The cadence of the prose, the illustrations, the subtle humour... ah! perfection. Mom is always grouching about how we need more Cooper at the library and then sighing heavily each time she gets her Visa statement.
12. Mrs. Wishy Washy by Joy Cowley
13. Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type by Doreen Cronin
14. Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin
    
--Mom sometimes groans that these books are written for adults not children. Too much winking to the adult sensibility but I just don't get it. I love Spider just as much as I loved Worm back when I read his diary just before I was two.
15. The Little Dog Laughed and other Nursery Rhymes illustrated by Lucy Cousins
16. Ella the Elephant by Carmela and Stephen D'Amico
17. The Classic Treasury of Best-Loved Children's Poems illustrated by Penny Dann +
    
18. A Child's Treasury of Nursery Rhymes compiled and illustrated by Kady MacDonald Denton * +
    
19. Mud Muddelicious Mud: Verse for the Very Young by Shirley Downie * +
    
20. Olivia by Ian Falconer
21. Olivia Saves the Circus by Ian Falconer
22. Olivia forms a Band by Ian Falconer
23. Bee Gets a Sweater by Keith Faulkener
24. Tap, Tap, Tap: What can it be? by Keith Faulkener
25. A-tisket, a-tasket by Ella Fitzgerald; illustrated by Ora Eitan
26. Beast Feast by Douglas Florian
27. A Pocket for Corduroy by Don Freeman
28. Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French
    
--as I was saying, "what's not to love about a Wombat?"
29. The Three Little Pigs illustrated by Marie Louise Gay
30. Grandma and the Pirates by Phoebe Gilman *
31. Jillian Jiggs and the Secret Surprise by Phoebe Gilman *
32. The Wonderful Pigs of Jillian Jiggs by Phoebe Gilman *
33. Jillian Jiggs to the Rescue by Phoebe Gilman *
34. Something from Nothing by Phoebe Gilman *
35. Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes
36. Jessica by Kevin Henkes
37. Lily's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes
    
-- I think I'm in love with Mr. Slinger
38. Lily's Big Day by Kevin Henkes
39. Once Around the Block by Kevin Henkes
40. Owen by Kevin Henkes
41. Shiela Rae the Brave by Kevin Henkes
42. Corduroy Lost and Found by B. Hennessy based on the Freeman books
43. Sea, Sand, Me by Patricia Hubbell
44. Hiding by Shirley Hughes
45. Colours by Shirley Hughes +
    
46. Songs for Annie Rose by Shirley Hughes +
47. Toot and Puddle: Charming Opal by Hollie Hobbie
48. The Llama Who had No Pajama by Maryann Hoberman +
    
--OMG, I love this collection!

49. Our Day at the Seashore by Amy and Richard Hutchings
    
--my Nan gave me this and a few other beach books to take along on my recent trip to PEI. Now I know what a quohog is.
50. Katie's Babbling Brother by Hazel Hutchins *
51. Rollie Pollie Ollie by William Joyce
52. Take Me Out to the Ball Game by MaryAnn Kovalski *
53. Lavender's Blue: A Book of nursery Rhymes compiled by Kathleen Lines +
    
--a reprint of the 1954 classic. Watch out! A few of the rhymes are from a more savage time: sometimes scary, sometimes deliciously dark.

54. Yummer's Too: the Second Course by James Marshall
55. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault
    
--loved the book but loved the Scholastic video even more. It's too cool for school.
56. Chicka Chicka 123 by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault
57. Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What do you See? by Bill Martin Jr.
58. Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What do you see? by Bill Martin Jr.
    
59. Piggy and Dad Go Fishing by David Martin
60. Dahlia by Barbara McClintock
61. The Oxford 123 Book of Number Rhymes by Robert McGough +
    
62. The Real Mother Goose Book of Christmas Carols
    
--ya, so, it's true that I made my mom sing every single one of these far into March. Hey! I wonder just where that book got to anyway?
63. All in One Piece by Jill Murphy
64. Peg and the Yeti by Kenneth Oppel *
65. The Oxenbury Nursery Story Book compiled and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury +
    
--so far I'm only into the verse section. I hope to start reading the fairy tales this fall

66. A Bit of Dancing by Helen Oxenbury
67. The Ocean Alphabet Book by Jerry Pallota
68. The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn
    
--Mom thinks this book will help me make the transition to day care in the fall. Boy, does she have another thing coming
69. A day of rhymes compiled by Sarah Pooley +
70. Beneath a Blue Umbrella by Jack Prelutsky +
    
--a great book of poems for all you kids, state-side. Mom has promised to find me a Canadian equivalent and then she said something about a Kevin Major alphabet book and told me to stay tuned.
71. For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funny Bone selected by Jack Prelutsky +
    
72. 10 Minutes 'Til Bedtime by Peggy Rathmann
73. The Gift by Barbara Reid *
74. My Friend Rabbit by Eric Rohmann
75. Beach Day by Karen Roosa
76. Tales from Parc La Fontaine by Roslyn Schwartz *
    
--the Complete Adventures of the Mole Sisters was on my toddler list. I'm still lovin' it too

77. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
78. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
79. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
80. My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss
81. Duck on a Bike by David Shannon
82. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
83. Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer
84. Mama Loves Me by Mara Van Fleet
    
--IMHO, the elephant is the most noble and loving creature on the planet.
85. So Say the Little Monkeys by Nancy Van Laan
    
--this book is like candy on the tongue: "they sing jibba, jibba, jabba as they jump and run. Jump jabba jabba. Run jabba jabba. Tiny, tiny monkeys having fun."
86. Frog in Love by Max Velthius
87. Super-Completely and Totally the Messiest by Judith Viorst
88. Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell
    
--too good for words: "How goes the work? Quack!"

89. Noisy Nora by Rosemary Wells
    
90. I Spy Little Christmas by Walter Wick
91. "More more more" said the baby : 3 love stories by Vera B. Williams
92. The King of Capri by Jeanette Winterson
    
--this book has laxative properties. My all-time favourite potty book. It's just so long.
93. The Napping House by Don and Audrey Wood
94. Piggies by Audrey and Don Wood
    
95. Here's a Little Poem edited by Jane Yolen +
96. How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? by Jane Yolen
97. any one of a number of cheap peg puzzle board books
98. any one of a number of Thomas the Tank Engine cheapo board books
99. any one of a number of magnetic counting, alphabet, or rudimentary spelling books
    
--no, I don't spell and I don't pretend to. I just like to play with the letters.
100. any one of a number of cheapo electronic music, sing-a-long books
     

*And ya, some of these books are meant for 4 and 5-year olds. It's also true that I still read baby books. Why must they put such limited age ranges on children's books. It's soooo totally oppressive.

I hope you like my list. You know what, though?. My silly mother decided to re-read all the Harry Potter books before finishing off the series. She made this decision in June. Like, duh! This means that she is only finishing up #5 now. Please help me! Can you ask your pre-schoolers to recommend some good books to tide me over until Mom is done? Thanks. I knew I could count on you.

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A note from the editor, compiler and chief amanuesnis aka Mad: Miss M puts quite a bit of work into drawing up these lists. She does it because she hopes that they will make helpful library cheat sheets for all her sphere-y friends. Please feel free to tell as many people as you like about them so that her work won't be in vain.

Oh and Miss M insists on writing these posts herself because she doesn't trust my adult editorializing. Not that I would ever do that. She really wants you to know about the books SHE loves regardless of whether her children's lit crit and librarian mother agrees. Little does she know that her mother plans revenge by posting a list of 26 wonderful alphabet books and 10 counting books without consulting her daughter whatsoever. Soon. I promise.

OK, I'm off now to help Miss M put links to this list and to her toddler list on the sidebar. Miss M finds Blogger a bother sometimes. I can't imagine why.

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Because I'm not posting as much these days, I thought I would give you all an early heads up about the upcoming Just Posts. You know the drill: if you have read or written a post or posts dealing with social justice in the month of July, drop me or Jen a line. You've got until August 7th. We'll put the linky love list up on Aug 10th. I'm madhattermommyAThotmailDOTcom.

How I wonder what you are

I was cuddling Miss M on the couch Saturday morning, cradling my coffee in one hand and a book in the other. My arm was around her and the chill of our back family room bit our noses as we snuggled under a blanket. This is one of the most familiar and cherished scenes in my life, as comfortable and familiar as my stretched elastic waistband pajamas and my worn-out sheep skin slippers. In that end-of-book silent pause Miss M burst into song:

J'aime papa
J'aime mama
J'aime Baby Daisy aussie

"What?" I thought to myself with more than a few exclamation marks. To the best of my knowledge, my daughter does not speak French. Yet here she was declaring her love (if rather dubiously in the same company as Baby Daisy) in the language of love itself.

WASPy old me, I speak French about as well as the next box of Shreddies. I do, however, live in Canada's only officially bilingual province, a province that is butted up against Quebec. Suffice to say my ear knows the difference between Ken Dryden French and la chose authentique. Miss M was singing la langue propre. One of her sitters is francophone by birth and, no doubt, she has been singing and possibly even speaking to Miss M in French, all of which is lovely. It's just that until this moment I didn't know. This woman is accent-free bilingual and I have a very unilingual relationship with her. I didn't have a clue that she was bilingual with my daughter.

This moment of being ripped quickly and wholly from my profoundly familiar world got me thinking about the power of language to transform. It also got me really thinking about the infant ability to absorb and acquire language in all its verbal complexity. Language acquisition is an aptitude that erodes quickly as we age. This fact saddens me greatly. Just imagine what our lives would be like if we retained this ability as we got older, the ability to hear and speak the words of others correctly, as they were intended, and with all the beauty and nuance of the native tongue. Imagine if we had access to all the world's languages to pick and choose from as we wish. Imagine if we could each make a lexicon of our own choosing to describe the world according to our own sense of aesthetics. There are definitely English words I adore like "slacks," "sandwich" and "chesterfield" that I would always keep in my vocabulary but oh how wonderful it would be to augment them with multi-lingual synonyms. I could take étoile instead of "star"; casa instead of "house"; kuchen instead of "cake", and so on and so on and so on. I could find those necessary words for which there is no equivalent in English. My world would expand according to my ability to describe it.

Indulging in all these wild imaginings has led me to realize that with each passing day Miss M becomes further enslaved by her mother tongue. I see it time and again. She encounters a word, she plays with it on her tongue, and eventually she adopts it with an evolving-to-correct pronunciation. The signified gets nailed to its signifier. Each time this happens her world becomes more concrete yet somehow so much more narrow for it. It's as if all the million possible alternative synonyms die in that moment of her very concrete language acquisition.

Fortunately I do hear sounds of rebellion coming from her, indications that she is willing to take agency and name the world for herself with her own words. Her favourite song right now is "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." For the longest time she believed the word for "star" was "twinkle" and because she could not pronounce "twinkle" she substituted her version, "Wait-da" instead. "Wait-da, wait-da" she sings day and night, particularly on cloudless nights from atop the swing in the park. Her command of the language is much better now and she definitely knows that the proper term for those points of light is "star" but she has consciously decided, in this instance, to name the world her way. Those magical dots in the sky and in the books, those brilliant companions to the "moooon", they simply can't be anything as prosaic as "stars"; no, they can't even be the more mystical étoiles of that other tongue she has heard; no those sparkling diamonds must be "wait-das." It's as if her entire understanding of the cosmos is weighted upon this knowledge of the right and proper word, this perfect marriage of signifier and signified.

Oh, where is this post going? There is so much I want to say about language and the way it brings us freedom because it gives us the power of understanding; about places in the world where being multi-lingual is simply a way of life; about my own regrets at being too poor and insecure to follow through with the Au Pair posting I had lined up in Paris the year after high school only to watch my French-language skills wither and die; about the size of Shakespeare and Joyce's vocabularies; about the dwindling lexicon of high school students today versus fifty years ago; about how my own relationship to words is one of the most powerful and transformative forces in my life; about the fact that I would genuinely like my daughter to learn as many languages as she can so that her world and her mind will be more expansive for it; about how I fear that ticking time-clock of lost aptitude because I also fervently believe these first few years should be entirely about play not structured learning; about the despair of living in a province with separate French, English, and Immersion school systems and a population-base that can support none of them adequately; and about the beauty of being told "I love you" in language and song that exists just beyond my grasp.

My mother's hands

My mother died in December 1999. At her funeral my aunt, in an effort to comfort me, told me to touch her one last time, not to be afraid of her body now that she was no longer in it. So I did. I went up to the coffin and I touched her hand. I don't know why people use the word "cold" to describe the dead. Mom wasn't cold; she was hard, stiff. In the act of touching her hand I knew that she was gone completely, that I would never have her with me again.

Those hands should not have been stiff. My mother's hands were where she expressed her life. From my earliest memories those hands were on the move. She "worried" them all the time: moving them back and forth, gently wringing them, turning small objects over and over in them. Her favourite worry object was the humble bread tie. When we were kids and she was doing her damnest to raise us on her own, we would snuggle into bed with her and find hard plastic bread ties scattered all over the sheets.

She also had her own way of pointing at objects. Instead of holding her hand like a gun and pointing as most people do, she held her hand flat, parallel to the ground and gestured with a curve to her pointer finger and a curve to her arm. It's hard to describe this action of hers but it was all hers. No one had hands that moved like my mother's.

Until now. My daughter was born with my mother's hands. I noticed it right off when she was still making fists that she constantly stuck in her mouth. At seven weeks, I took her to meet my family and some of my brothers and sisters noticed it as well. Miss M has my mother's hands, their shape, their movements. The pinky finger is curved, almost as if she were missing a knuckle. This biological quirk was detected inutero at 18 weeks gestation. But it's not just the pinky that's curved. There's something about the shape and movement of her hands that is best described as "curvy".

Now that Miss M is eager to expand her vocabulary, she has discovered the utility of pointing. She points at everything, hoping that I will give it a label. And yes, she has my mother's flat-hand, curved-movement, finger-point. I don't know much about who Miss M will be yet but I do know this: her life and her birthright are in her hands.

The Sorting Shelves (for a description of what the Sorting Shelves is all about see the March 15th post)
The Frog Prince and Other Poems by Stevie Smith. Longmans, Green and Co. 1966.