Baby Giggles

Apparently, it's a fact that babies love to look at faces, especially faces of other babies. And I've noticed that when I go out with Purple Butterfly and Pink Butterfly, Pink Butterfly loves to watch all the kids, but she's especially drawn to other babies, and they are drawn to her.

But when it comes to books for babies, in my experience, it's hard to find books with pictures of babies that aren't picture dictionaries or simple description of emotion or color. But in Baby Giggles by photographer Rachael Hale, there are wonderful pictures of babies with a great rhyming text that explores a range of emotions - from happy to grumpy to hungry to sleepy and in between. The photographs are adorable and well representative of the emotion being discussed. The accompanying text is actual verse and well matched in intonation to the emotion of the photograph. And it provides a great lead in to start your own discussion of the picture and emotion.

Pink Butterfly is not yet the huge bookworm her sister was at this age. She doesn't sit for story after story, and sometimes she'd rather chew the book than look at it. But this book engages her. When we pick it up, she's smiling at the cover. She pats at the pictures of the babies. She giggles along. I talk to her about why the baby might be grumpy or how it looks like the babies are having so much fun in the bath, just like she does. I really think this book is a first step along the path of Pink Butterfly possibly becoming a bookworm.