Books for Busy Toddlers

Colton is a busy, busy boy. That means he’d much rather be collecting rocks (seriously, I have a small waterning can outside that is now filled with rocks) than reading books. Still, we’ve found quite a few that he loves to look at alone and have read to him time and time again.

Lift the flap books are fantastic, and Colton really loves My Little People Farm Lift the Flap. It’s loaded with flaps, which are a little hard to open to for a younger baby but should be fine for a one year old, and has lots and lots of animals to look at. Colton hasn’t managed to rip any of the flaps off yet either, which makes it a winner in my books.

Speaking of lift the flaps, anything by Karen Katz is fantastic. We started with Where is Baby’s Belly Button and also really like <a href=”Daddy and Me“>Daddy and Me. These have great, big flaps, one to a page, and tell a story. The flaps are sturdy and reattach wonderfully with plain ol’ Elmer’s.

We recently checked out The More We Get Together from our local library, and since it wasn’t lift the flap or touch and feel I wasn’t sure how it would go, but Colton is in love with this one. I sing the words on each page, which I think makes it more interesting for him, but the illustrations are simple, cute and all about the adorable kids.

The trifecta of awesome toddler books, is, in mine and Colton’s opinions, Good Morning, Good Night. This fabulous book has large, fold out pages and animals with large touch and feel areas. This is a great book for babies, who have a hard time touching smaller areas in some kid’s books, and toddlers, who want to do it themselves.

Colton loves My Big Animal Book, which has real pictures of all kinds of animals, rather than illustrations. This is one of the books I catch him “reading” on his own most often.

You can never go wrong with a classic like Pat the Bunny. This was one of my favorites, so I’m glad Colton likes it as well. He did, however go through a phase after learning all of the actions for each page where he simply licked everything. Strange kid. But now he’s back to enjoying peek-a-boo and smelling flowers.

We just got our copy of Lift the Flap Bible today, but Colton and I both really like it. The flaps are similar to those in the Little People books, the illustrations are lush and engaging, and each page comes with a short Bible story.

Teaser Tuesday — When Two Become Three

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s how it works:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“When you feel angry at your spouse, ask yourself, ‘What do I want from my spouse right now?’ and then try to turn your anger into a request. I have found that when one person is angry at his spouse over something, that anger is often a secondary emotion.”

– When Two Become Three: Nurturing Your Marriage After Baby Arrives, Mark E. Crawford, PhD pg. 52

Teaser Tuesday — Now and Then

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s how it works:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“Anna looked out the window. The thatched roofs were wrong, the man hitched to the plow was wrong. She was pretty sure this was Ireland, given the accents and the landscape, and that was very wrong. And it wasn’t now, not Anna’s now.”

– Now and Then, Jacqueline Sheehan pg. 58

Teaser Tuesday — The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s how it works:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“All he knew was that when he walked into Brenda’s kitchen, I was alive, well, and buckled into a pair of black-and-white denim overalls like a train engineer, the sorrowful dog curled loyally by my side in a corner, Amelia crouched next to me, watching with savage interest as I wielded a pink plastic doll leg. My father glanced around, but there was no evidence of the rest of the figure.”

– The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, Tiffany Baker pg. 43

Teaser Tuesday — Fire

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s how it works:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“There must have been two hundred raptors, flashing bright colors against an orange and pink sky, high up where only the luckiest of arrows could reach them. Their screeches made her cold. Her hand flew to the edges of her headscarf to check for stray hairs, for she knew that if the raptors discovered what she was, they’d cease even to notice the human army”

– Fire, Kristin Cashore pg. 77

* NOTE: Fire is a “companion” novel to Graceling. While the publishers say you can read and enjoy Fire without having read Graceling, and I agree, if you do want to read both, read Graceling first! Events in Fire will spoil Graceling! *

Recently Read

Here a few highlights, and one low-light, of books I read last month.

DragonKnight — Donita K. Paul

This is the third book in a series of Christian fantasy novels. Even though I’ve read all three, this isn’t my favorite series. The previous two books focused on Kale, a young servant girl who has an uncanny ability to find dragon eggs. This book, however, focuses on Bardon, a young man trying to decide if he wants to join Paladin, the spiritual leader of his country, in service to Wulder as a knight. Surprisingly, I didn’t really miss the focus on Kale. I found Bardon to be a more mature, relatable character for me, and really enjoyed seeing things from his point of view. As a result, this is my favorite of the three books I’ve read so far. While I do enjoy seeing how Paul brings Christian themes into a fantasy setting, this just isn’t my favorite series, and I don’t think I’ll go out of my way to read the fourth book.

The Last Queen — C.W. Gortner

This historical fiction focuses on the life of Juana La Loca (Juana the Mad) of Spain, in the 1490′s and early 1500′s. I had mixed feelings about reading this before I started, but by page 25, I was hooked. I loved Juana’s strong character, and how Gortner developed her as a character. Just about every single character in this novel makes a choice that seems pretty horrible, heartless or cold. Yet, Gortner has the ability to make these characters seem sympathetic, particularly Juana. I think a large reason I was able to see Juana as a sympathetic character was how Gortner allowed us to see her grown from a headstrong teenager into an adult, but also how he slowly revealed how ill-prepared she was for life she was eventually expected to lead. I really didn’t know anything about Juana la Loca before reading this novel, but I had heard of, and knew a few things about, many of the peripheral characters, which only served to make this novel richer. Of all the books I read last month, this was my favorite, and one I would definitely recommend!

The Chess Machine — Robert Lohr

I purchased this novel at a book fair almost two years ago, and just got around to reading it! This novel is the story of an ambitious courtier is Hungry, eager to impress his Empress with his ability to make an automaton who can play chess. And not just play, but win every game. Yet his mechanical wonder holds a secret — it is operated by a chess-genius dwarf, Tibor. While I don’t know the first thing about chess, I still throughly enjoyed this one. Lohr really doesn’t make any effort to cast the character’s actions in a sympathetic light, and yet I still found myself wanting everything to work out for each of the characters. The prose in this book is wonderful, and most of the scenes of chess games are described as analogies, so even if you have no chess background, you won’t wonder what happened during them. The one thing I found difficult in reading this novel is that, especially in the begining, the timeline jumps around quite a bit. Also, one of the characters goes by two different names in the two different times the novel focuses on, which made following the first four or five chapters more difficult for me. Overall, this was another one of the novels I really enjoyed this month, but I didn’t love it.

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Thanks for all your comments on yesterday’s post! I’ve decided to try to contain all pregnancy related things to a post on Friday, so if you’re interested in how things are going, check back then. If you aren’t interested, just skip Fridays!

Teaser Tuesday — Stealing Home

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s how it works:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“Now nobody has ever before asked me to choose anything I’ve ever owned. Every autumn a group of nice white people come to our church with boxes of clothes and shoes they spread out over all the benches. But that’s not the same. Sometimes there’s nothing there that fits me and I have to wait until spring when they come back again.”

– Stealing Home, Allison Pittman pg. 82

Book Review — Her Fearful Symmetry

This weekend, I read Her Fearful Symmetry, but Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. I haven’t read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and wasn’t intending to read Her Fearful Symmetry, but I heard so many rave reviews, I decided to add it to my requests list at my local library, expecting to have to wait months; instead, I picked the book up two days after it had been released.

Here’s how the Publisher’s Website described the novel:

Julia and Valentina Poole are semi-normal American twenty-year-olds with seemingly little interest in college or finding jobs. Their attachment to one another is intense. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. From a London solicitor, the enclosed letter informs Valentina and Julia that their English aunt Elspeth Noblin, whom they never knew, has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions to this inheritance: that they live in it for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the estranged Elspeth and Edie, their mother.

The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast and ornate Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, Stella Gibbons and Karl Marx are buried. Julia and Valentina come to know the living residents of their building. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword-puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive compulsive disorder; Marijke, Martin’s devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt’s neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including — perhaps — their aunt.

After completing Her Fearful Symmetry, I will definitely be reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. Her Fearful Symmetrywas fabulous, wonderful, lyrical, and I cannot say how much I loved it. The lyrical prose exceeded my expectations. So did the idea of the ghost story, which I feel Niffenegger really reinterpreted and took in an entirely new direction than what has been seen before. The plot could have been predictable, but it was delightfully fresh, and one of the twists made my eyes bug out.

Entwined with the story of Julia and Valentina were the stories of the other occupants of their flat building — Robert, Martin and his wife Marijke. We got to hear parts of the story in each of their voices. What Niffenegger accomplished so well in the case of each of her characters was to make the reader care about them and what happened with them. Each of the characters seemed completely real, and even if I didn’t identify with or even like a character, Niffenegger’s skill with character development made me care about their fates.

This novel also delves into what it is like being a twin, and the issues embodied in that. As the granddaughter and great-niece of identical twins, I found this aspect of the novel fascinating. I have lots of questions to ask them now!

This is not a particularly face-paced novel, but its the perfect “get cozy and read” novel. Read it. You will be glued to the edge of your seat and awed by Niffenegger’s prose. I completely, whole-heartedly recommend this one!

Teaser Tuesday — Graceling

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s how it works:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“Well, and she knew they must have this conversation eventually, and she preferred to have it in the dark, where his eyes wouldn’t unnerve her. Katsa pulled the quiver over her head and laid it on the slab of stone.”

–Graceling, Kristin Cashore pg. 76

Teaser Tuesday – A Sweet Disorder

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here’s how it works:

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“Here we are on the queen’s barge, and you look as if this river led to Hades.”

“If only you understood the truth of those words,” I said, aware I could not tell him of all that had passed.”

–A Sweet Disorder, Jacqueline Kolosov pg. 210