Books We Love – The Creative Salad

Weekend Moment

David has been reading The Hobbit aloud to the kids. (Despite the incredibly violent movie adaptations, the book is written for children.) Our daughter is LOVING the story and now all imaginative play involves hobbits, wizards, and dwarves. Daddy is in heaven!

Fantastic Butterfly Life Cycle Books for Kids

This past month we’ve had so much fun learning about the butterfly life cycle!

We’ve raised and observed different types of butterflies, deconstructed a beloved classic, and read our way through dozens of butterfly books.

Here are some of our favorites:

Featured above:
Are You a Butterfly? prompts the reader to imagine themselves as a butterfly as it transforms from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

A Butterfly Is Patient with stunning watercolor illustrations and fascinating scientific tidbits.

Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian (above) presents a historical perspective from the Middle Ages, telling the true story of a young girl who carefully observed and documented the butterfly life cycle, thereby disproving the commonly held belief that insects were evil, created from mud in a process called spontaneous generation. What a fantastic female role model for little scientists!

From Caterpillar to Butterfly presents a story that any kid who raises butterflies at school or home can relate to: the joy at watching metamorphosis unfold firsthand in a classroom setting.

Nic Bishop: Butterflies and Moths featuring fantastic, up-close photographs of a number of different butterfly and moth species as they undergo metamorphosis.
(We also love his Scholastic Reader Level 2: Butterflies book (above) featuring many of the same photographs but written for younger readers!)

The Life Cycles of Butterflies: From Egg to Maturity, a Visual Guide to 23 Common Garden Butterflies (above) is the ULTIMATE butterfly reference book full of detailed information, stunning photos, and useful factoids about the life stages of 23 frequently seen butterflies. This book provided to be the most valuable resource in our comparison of different eggs, caterpillars, chrysalises, and butterflies. Check it out!

Other butterfly life cycle books and guides that we enjoyed include:
– Butterflies and Moths (Golden Guide)
– Waiting for Wings
– Monarch Butterfly of Aster Way – a Smithsonian’s Backyard Book
– National Geographic Readers: Great Migrations Butterflies
– Butterfly & Moth (Eyewitness Books)
– Butterfly Story
– Creepy, Crawly Caterpillars
– Butterflies in the Garden
– A Butterfly’s Life (Science Slam: Animal Diaries: Life Cycles)
– Miss Hallberg’s Butterfly Garden

Wow, did we read a lot of books this month. Please check them out!

The Best Books for Parents of Young Children

Let me preface this by saying that while I have read many, many parenting books, there are so many other parenting books out there that I haven’t read yet. In fact I have a very bad habit of taking out “phenomenal” parenting books from the library (on friends recommendations), flipping through, and then having to return them before I get a chance to read them. Sometimes I renew them not once but twice and I still can’t find the time to tackle them.

STORY OF MY LIFE. So many interests, so little time.

The books below are the best of the ones I have read all the way through AND loved. These are the books that not just shaped our parenting style, but best describe it.

We think these four books are must-reads for all parents of young children:
1. How To Raise An Amazing Child the Montessori Way — evidently that’s what we’re doing!
2. Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting — if you’re going to read one book, this is it. Completely changed how we do, oh, everything.
3. NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children — for those of us who don’t have time to stay on top of parenting news articles, this book summarizes the latest research.
4. Positive Discipline for Preschoolers: For Their Early Years–Raising Children Who are Responsible, Respectful, and Resourceful — the book we loved until we read Peaceful Parents, Happy Kids, which trumped it. Still worth reading though!

Don’t have time to read a whole book, but want some awesome parenting advice right now? This awesome article is worth reading RIGHT NOW.

Please join in the discussion. What parenting books do you love? I’m excited to check out your recommendations.

May Book List

This is what happens in a family of readers.

We have piles of books and magazines everywhere. Our bookshelves are stacked three rows of books deep.

We love to read ourselves to sleep and almost always stay up too late each night devouring our books:

We read absolutely everywhere:

Here’s what we’re reading right now.

Our daughter is plowing through the Boxcar Children Mysteries series. She’s read (and reread!) the first thirteen books and now is savoring “Tree House Mystery.” It will probably take her less than a day to read this one. She blows us away with her passion for books and dedication to reading.

The little guy is looking at “Can You See What I See?” (from the used book store), a gift from his big sister. For the most part, he just watches us when we read to him. When you’re eleven weeks old, pictures are blase. Moving mouths, on the other hand, are incredibly fascinating.

I just finished rereading the Twelve Houses series by Sharon Shinn and am toying with the idea of rereading the Artefacts of Power series by Maggie Furey. I have found that I cannot read new books at this stage of life, as I get sucked into these fascinating new worlds and then stay up WAY TOO LATE. New books = time suckage. SIGH. I hope to read new things again soon.

David reads many new books, lucky guy! His most recent read is the latest book in Robin Hobb’s Rain Wilds Chronicles series, Blood of Dragons.

We love our fantasy books. They make for the best escapism.

What are you enjoying reading right now?

Essential Reading for Expectant Moms

While I joke that reading Calvin and Hobbes is the best way to prepare for parenthood, I consider three books must reads for all expectant moms.

(When you’re pregnant or a new mom the last thing you want to do is Google issues; there is so much crap advice online. Instead I recommend you stick with informative, non-alarmist books written by experts. These are the books for you.)

1. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding by Diane Wiessinger, Diana West, and Teresa Pitman
2. Having a Baby, Naturally by Peggy O’Mara
3. The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two by William and Martha Sears — currently on sale for $9, that’s 60% off.

The above books are so comprehensive that I’ve tossed all our other pregnancy books and consult these regularly. (You don’t even need to read them all the way through; just read the chapters that interest you and then keep a copy handy for when problems arise.)

In fact, this week I’ve already reread parts relating to drinking alcohol while breastfeeding (one glass of wine with dinner is fine on occasion once your milk is established) and the frequency of poops in newborns (skipping a day or two or seven evidently is entirely normal in newborns older than six weeks).

Ah, parenting can be so glamorous.

Stay tuned for several AWESOME parenting books to read. I found a couple that are WAY better than all the rest. I’m excited to share them with you soon.

Whoops! Evidently I wrote this exact same post five years ago. These must really be the best books out there. HA!