The first short list of my favorite books from when I turned one to when I turned two:

  Five Little Pumpkins (Harper Growing Tree) illustrated by Dan Yaccarino: I loved this book when I first turned one.  The classic rhyme has been illustrated by many different artists, but this particular version appealed to me most.  The illustrations are brightly colored with larger graphics, and they are simple yet filled with expression.  In addition to counting, my Mama and Dada liked to talk about colors and do some baby signs (moon, cat, ghost–floating hand with “ooooooo” sound), too.

  Horns to Toes and in Between by Sandra Boynton:  Ahhh….Sandra Boynton.  Genius.  Poet.  Humorist.  All for us little ones!  My Mama was teaching me body parts, and this book is one of the “body parts books” that I really liked.

  What Will Fat Cat Sit On? by Jan Thomas: Speaking of humorists, Jan Thomas is pretty darn funny, too.  I loved this book because of the built-in theatrics.  It’s impossible to read this book without using exaggerated inflection (which helps us little ones hear word parts more clearly), and the situation is clearly urgent (especially for the various animals Fat Cat might just pop a squat on) and very funny.  The text is also simple, very large, and with few words to a page so children begin to see how individual words are separated.

  How to Catch An Elephant by Amy Schwartz:  Oh boy.  I read this book over and over and over and over again with both Mama and Dada for a full year.  It’s much longer and more involved than any other book I really liked in this period.  Really, it’s more like a book for a three year old, but I loved it because of the foot stomping and the elephant sounds and the repetition and the complexity of the puzzle.  The resolution is a fairly tough idea for a little person (inverted telescope makes the elephant smaller), but that’s part of the reason I liked it.  It was challenging!

Mama’s note: This last book was a stretch for Luke, but it exposed him to more advanced vocabulary, sentence structure, and plot line.  He requested it multiple times a day for a very long time.  We wore out the renewals at our library (12 weeks all told), and then I finally bought a copy.  My first record of us reading it was at 12.5 months, and we read it six times that day!

Happy reading!

—Luke (blog co-star, age two and a half)