Our Favourite Reads: Second Edition

Today on the blog I think it'll be another day that focuses on E. I'm doing plenty that's interesting for and by myself, but I'm not far enough in any books I'm reading to review them, and we're only one day into the next week of my half marathon training. Perhaps if I get into a fun new recipe I'll mention that soon.

But the other week during our trip to library, we made off with a few good finds, and these two were the best of the lot:

Je mangerais bien un enfant (or, 'I could really go for a child', if you don't read French. I don't.) is by Sylviane Donnio and Dorotheé de Manfreid. This is a book for the parents of picky eaters. Little Achille keeps turning up his nose at all the food Mummy and Daddy Crocodile bring him: what he really wants to eat is a little kid. Though really; who turns up chocolate cake for the possibility of eating a child!?

Monkey and Me is by the amazingly adorable and refreshingly quirky Emily Gravett. She's also written Dogs, Wolf Won't Bite, and The Odd Egg, all of which we've read in this house, as well as many others. Monkey and Me has a great rhythm in its repeating lines and introduces your kid to a bunch of fun animals that the little girl and her monkey imitate throughout the book. And at the end of the day, as all little kids do, she crashes and sleeps having had loads of fun. E especially enjoys that the first animal in the book is a group of penguins. The kid watches this David Attenborough clip from the BBC's Frozen Planet on repeat: that and Oliver Jeffers are the reasons that penguins were the first animal he could identify. (I was going to embed the video directly, but all I could find was a version with an American narrator for the Discovery Channel who was absolutely rubbish. Attenborough or nothing!)

via, David Attenborough

There will probably be another French-language book in the next set of our favourite reads. I mean, if you want an excuse to polish off those language skills from college (or in the Husband's case, from 3 childhood years in Versailles and 2 years as an adult in Quebec), it doesn't get much easier than reading some children's books to your kid. Sadly, I have yet to find anything in German that I can read, but I still love listening in on the father-son French language time. I mean: men who are good with kids are cute. Men who speak a foreign language are nifty. Watching my husband do both is basically as adorable as it gets.