Katy No-Pocket by Emmy Payne, illustrated by H.A. Rey

We love Curious George, so Katy No-Pocket was always going to make an appearance in our house. Margret Rey wasn't involved, but H.A. Rey's illustrations and Emmy Payne's story is very sweet. Its about Katy, a kangaroo with no pocket for her son to ride in. Look at her crying and watching the other mothers prance by...

She decides to ask her animal friends without pockets, how they carry their young.

Some just let them walk themselves.

Some shove them out of the nest and let them learn to fly alone!

But none of these methods will work for Katy. So she asks a wise and grumpy owl what to do. He sends her to the city. Which is fantastic because it gives us another of H.A. Rey's cityscapes. Feast your eyes.

If you look closely, on the right(your right) is a man with an apron with lots of pockets. Who also happens to be very kind. He gives it to her! And she gets all the pockets she needs.

Look at all the tools! My four year old son loves this page.

A read again and again story. For ages three to seven.

Christina Katerina & THE BOX by Patricia Lee Gauch, illustrated by Doris Burns.

I saw this book years ago, but because it had a girls name in the title, thought for some daft reason, my boys wouldn't like it. I was so wrong! SO wrong.
Christina Katerina's mother gets a new fridge. And Christina Katerina gets the box. Look what she does with it. (I reviewed Doris Burns books Andrew Henry's Meadow here, and her illustrations in this book are just as detailed and lovely.)

Isn't it lovely? And every time her mother thinks Christina Katerina has stopped playing with the box, and tries to throw it away, the little girl finds another use for it. (I mean I know we all want our kids to be creative - but the mess does sometimes get irritating, right?) 

Until here, where her mother asks if she has finally finished. By now the box has disintegrated into mud. Christina Katerina runs by and says..

"Oh,you mean that old ragged box? Lets do throw it away."

As well as great illustrations, this book is beautifully written. I'm not surprised its been in print since 1971. Perfect for girls and boys ages three to seven.

Ideally, have an empty box in the house before you read it though, because you'll definitely need one.

Washi tape!

Washi tape. I only heard of it about a year ago and couldn't find it anywhere in Dublin. It seemed to be one of those things that you can get in America easily and cheaply but no one has heard of here. Which of course made me want it even more! Anyway, I was in BookStation last week and found these. Three rolls for €2!

Wow. Its very handy. My four year old spent ages cutting and sticking with it. For three days in a row, while I did homework with his brothers, he was occupied. Which made that painful afternoon hour, between half three and half four way more bearable than usual.

P.s. In Bookstation this isn't labelled washi tape - in the shop I found it tucked in with the crafty stuff - lollipop sticks and the like - have a look at all the rolls - there are loads of different patterns.

Last minute Minecraft party

My nine year old had his birthday during the school holidays in August and I promised then that we would take a few friends to the Ninja Turtles movie when it came out. Anyways, I noticed that it was showing yesterday and today for previews, whatever they are and thought we may as well go for it. There were three friends free and with brothers, that filled the car. Then he reminded me that I also promised a Minecraft cake. I think the picture explains how we put it together. Those are Tesco fizzy water bottles (7up ones are green too) and that's a sponge cake made in two brown bread tins. My oldest boys did the creeper faces on the bottles with the sharpie and I did the one on the cake (using the Betty Crocker incredibly sweet icing as glue) with the mint aero balls which VERY handily are both green and brown. And tasty.

Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann

This is just one in my hidden-away-for-Christmas stash.

I loved Struwwelpeter when I was small. I don't know why, its not for the fainthearted and I would certainly have been classified as fainthearted. I was a thumb-sucking wimp and yet my absolute favourite story in the book was about little Suck-a-thumb!

For anyone who has not heard of it Struwelpeter is a collection of cautionary tales written in Germany in 1845. Anyone who is tired of reading about Horrid Henry and the lack of consequences for his actions - try this book. Look what happens to Harriet when she plays with matches!

Anyway, I CANNOT wait to read this one at bedtime.

For ages three to adult.

National Geographic Kids - Planets and Arthur's Halloween

I got Planets because I knew my boys would like it, and also because I suddenly realised that if I were at a table quiz and faced with questions about our solar system, I might not know the answers. The National Geographic Kid series are great. (This is the hardcover version of my one - the softback ones are between four and five euros! And reliably good. Like this one and this one.)

And there's Arthur's Halloween. I may have blogged about him before, if so treat this as a reminder that Arthur is great. We were reading this last night and none of us could remember what animal Arthur was. I have read so many American kids books that we are by now familiar with Opossums and chipmunks and bears, but for the life of me I couldn't remember if he was an anteater or an aardvark. Anyway, I just checked. He's an aardvark.

The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Again.

I mentioned a while ago that I had splashed out on the Taschen collection of Grimms Fairy Tales. Well, it was money well spent. We all love it. But especially my nine year and eleven year olds. This post is just to share a few more of the illustrations (all from various editions of the tales, from the 1820's to the 1950's). They are AMAZING.

Maps by Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinska

For some reason, Maps was reduced to £6.40 stg last week on Amazon.co.uk. This week its £10.88. That's still a lot cheaper than the price in the shops around here - around €24.00. I have been eyeing it up for a few months but the price and the glaring omission of Ireland from its pages stopped me. However, I got over that and have to admit, it is a fabulous book. Not a conventional atlas, its a (long pause here, how do i describe this book?) set of illustrations of forty two countries, the Artic and Antartica, with details of each country also drawn in. Make sense?

As well as being enormous, beautifully bound and chock full of fantastic details, it has an impressive shelf life. My four year old pre-reader can examine the pages the same way he does the Where's Wally books and other detailed illustrations and his older reading brothers can look up whatever countries they have an interest in at the time and are bound to find out something new.

So, if you gave this as a present to a three year old and he would still be using at at the ages of seven or eight and older. A pretty good investment all round.

Tom Trueheart and the Land of Dark Stories by Ian Beck

There are four boys in this house and its a pretty noisy place. Each of us have our own way of finding a bit of peace(mine is getting up extra early and having a cup of tea in a silent kitchen, recently my nine year old has decided to join me..) and my eleven year old listens to audio books in his bedroom. (That is, when the option of a computer screen, Youtube and a pair of headphones have been ruled out.) So, I was putting away pyjamas the other day heard a excerpt of this.

Wow, I was really impressed. Its great! Adventurey, fairy tale-ish, funny and most importantly for an audio book, there's an excellent narrator. Its the second time my son has taken it out of the library, so he's a fan, and later at bedtime, when I decided I was too tired to read, his four and nine year old brothers listened to it with him. In silence. Bliss.

The one above is the second in the series, and I think there is a third too. So far I have found the first on audio here and all the books here. But I'm pretty sure the library would have the lot.

Andrew Henry's Meadow by Doris Burn

I really thought I'd blogged about this one before. But I must just have thought about it, and never actually done it. Anyway Andrew Henry's Meadow is one of our most beautiful well, loved books. It's particularly popular at the moment as my youngest has recently got a bit more patient and I can read picture books with a bit more bite. And we can take some time to examine the detail in the illustrations. Which is one of the amazing things about this book. Look, here is one of Andrew Henry's inventions.

and here's a close-up. (And that's just a fraction of the whole thing. Its ALL beautiful.)

Created in 1965, Andrew Henry is inventive. The middle child of five, neither his siblings, or parents appreciate his creative nature.

And so he decides to take off for a while.

My photos have come out too dark for some reason but there are millions of details in these drawings; tools, toys and household objects which make them a joy to explore.

Anyway, Andrew Henry goes to a meadow he knows, and builds himself exactly the type of house he wants, where no one complains about him.

And, before long, other kids whose interests are not appreciated at home, appear.

First,  a little farmers daughter who loves birds.

Later, a musician who can now be as loud as she likes.

Then someone who wants to be Lady Jane, rather than plain Jane.

Before long, the meadow is full.

But, the children are missed and are eventually reunited with worried parents.

And Andrew Henry gets his own spot for his inventions, where his family finally appreciate them.

For ages four and up.

The Lone Ranger - a Little Golden Book Classic, I Am Pilgrim, To Kill a Mocking Bird and an Origami Yoda

I love this one. Such a welcome change from Transformers, Batman, Spiderman and all the other characters my boys have had a fixation on over the past decade.

It is exactly what you would expect. Young Tom Mason sits on a rock and waits to wave to his brother, who is due to pass by. He's Bill and he drives the stagecoach. But hang on a second, here it comes, but the drivers seat is empty!

Luckily, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are not too far away. "Listen Tonto!" the Lone Ranger cried. "That youngster's in trouble!" It transpires that a dastardly gang have stolen the stagecoach with its cargo of gold and seem to think they have got away scot free....

"That may not be their fire," the Lone Ranger said. "But if it is, those varmints are mighty sure of themselves. Let's check."

They do a whole lot more than check! They ambush and catch those filthy, no-good thieves! Excellent stuff. For ages four and up.

Elsewhere in the house is more edge of the seat material.

This is currently on sale in Tesco for under seven euros and I am looking forward to getting stuck in.  I've just finished my annual re read of this,

and am hoping it will be a move from the sublime to the ridiculously exciting.

And here we have an actual Origami Yoda...

Do you have kids aged eight and up who have not read this series? Well, you shouldn't. 

The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell.

I've made a few false starts on this blog post. The Animal Family is hard to describe without feeling I am not doing it justice. Its a different read. And its a definite read aloud. A story about a hunter, a mermaid, a bear, a lynx and a little boy, it is quite simply very, very beautiful. I know this isn't a word that tempts most kids to a book but I will say that when I read this aloud, over three night, my three youngest(four, nine, eleven) were silent. The book was on the shelf since last Christmas and none of them were tempted to try it themselves so I wasn't expecting that at all. And even though it does have great reviews, neither did I expect it to be so beautifully written. Often, when I read aloud, my voice gets tired, even with "good" books. But with this, it just didn't.

I was about thirty pages in when I read the reviews on the back dust cover and wasn't expecting to see one by P.L. Travers. I had assumed the book was written in the seventies or eighties but no, it was 1965 and the author of Mary Poppins must have worked at the New York Time Book Review at the time. She loved it too.

It has only "decorations" (by Maurice Sendak) rather than illustrations so the beauty is almost all in the story and language (and actually, the hardback cover. See below.)

But its a beauty that will lend a lovely glow to any bedtime. For ages four to adult.