What is Ezri reading?

Here’s what bedtime stories looked like in 2011.

Here’s bedtime stories now.

Books the Blau family is sad to return to the library include:

Little Mouse by Alison Murray in which a girl tells how her mommy likes to call her “her little mouse.” But she likens herself to brave lions, hungry horses, loud elephants, and ends headed for bed saying how she sometimes likes being mommy’s little mouse. The illustrations make this one. They are both uncluttered and detailed in one artistic stroke. By which I mean the facial expressions fit perfectly and the animals the girl compares herself to can be found in the final spread of her bedroom in subtle details like a single lion tail hanging out of her toy box. This one is lovely and Ezri likes it and her little brother is an even bigger fan.

Llama Llama Time to Share by Anna Dewdney
The parents here are enjoying all the puns about Llama’s “gnu” friend Nelly Gnu. It’s a perfectly pitched story about how hard it can be to share, but how friends are worth sharing with because of the joy they bring. The rhyming meter makes it a particularly pleasant read aloud book.

What Happens on Wednesdays by Emily Jenkins
A city girl tells us what happens on Wednesdays in her family from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. You see her neighborhood, her relationship with mom and dad, She tells about her day from a child vantage point including the important things like putting her things in her cubby at preschool or maybe it’s kindergarten and putting band-aids on her stuffed elephant Looga. It is a great book to start discussion of what we do in any given day and how a Wednesday’s schedule might be different from other days of the week. Ezri and I talked all about what happens on her Wednesdays.

Squid and Octopus Friends for Always by Tao Nyeu
I would liken this to Lobel’s Frog and Toad in the best way. Two friends with particular personalities helping each other, making funny mistakes (Ezri loves that they wear boots on their heads), and sharing. Really easy to read repeatedly and we have. The artwork is lovely and more copious and detailed than Lobel. including cartoon speech bubbles. I mean who doesn’t want to see an Octopus and Squid in mittens, socks and hats. The page of Squid describing his dream that he has X-ray vision and looking into a submarine has a dye cut page with holes for the windows that opens to a detailed interior of the submarine and its passengers. Ivan loves this page and it can be hard to continue the story as he wants to stay with this page a long time.