Make Your Own Coloring Book

Printables featuring my daughter’s favorite book characters?! Perfect for this little girl.

Lilly, Chester, Angelina, Little Bear, Winnie the Pooh, the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Frances…

Every day when we read their stories, we visit with them. To my daughter, these storybook characters are dear friends.

I’m thrilled she loves and admires these wonderful characters instead of drooling over Disney characters or Princesses. (Although that stage is probably just around the corner, knock on wood.)

The best part about these printables? They are free. So many children’s illustrators have wonderful websites and many of them contain fantastic games and coloring pages to download and print to share.

Here are some of our favorites:

+ Kevin Henkes, author/illustrator of Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse and Chester’s Way

+ Jan Brett, author/illustrator of The Mitten and The Owl and the Pussycat

+ Eric Carle, author/illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (more Eric Carle printables here)

+ Laura Numeroff, author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

+ Tomie dePaola, author and illustrator of Strega Nona

Reading Up For the Spring Season

We have two weeks until April when the spring gardening really begins here in Northern California.

Time to say goodbye to the winter garden:

And get ready to plant for spring.

In that vein, we’ve started reading a number of fantastic gardening books. Here’s a glimpse of some of our favorites from this week:





Shown above:
+ Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert (vibrant illustrations and a simple story depicting the process of planning, planting, and picking flowers in a garden that children can easily relate to)
+ My Garden by Kevin Henkes (an imaginative tale about what a little girl would have in her very own garden, such as morning glories that stayed open all night, jellybean trees, flowers that grew back as soon as you picked them (above), and all carrots would be invisible because “I don’t like carrots.”)
+ Gardening with Children by Brooklyn Botanic Garden (a must-read book for family gardeners, full of gardening activities introducing nature’s cycles and earth’s ecology)
+ Eating the Alphabet: Fruits & Vegetables from A to Z (not directly about gardening per se but a beautifully illustrated alphabet book about fruits and vegetables; great inspiration for deciding what to plant in the garden!)

The Reading Nook

David built this sturdy, double-sided bookcase for our daughter. For the past two years it’s been in our living room overflowing with books (the following photo might as well be the “before” shot from 2009 back when we had only that many books).

After boxing up and putting away many of our beloved board books, we moved it upstairs to our daughter’s new bedroom.

Here’s the shot from before we started the transformation from spare bedroom/office/junk closet to big girl bedroom:

Wow, does it look less cluttered now, though we have more work to do:

Remember this video of our daughter reciting her version of Eric Carle’s classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, from last week?

She’s reading in front of the bookcase in her new room!

One side of the bookcase has our before bedtime books and some picture book fiction,

the other side contains (mostly) a nonfiction collection:


I’m in the process of framing art from beloved children’s books to hang next to the bookcase, but in the meantime our daughter asked us to hang pictures from two of last years family calenders (one with pictures of her and the other featuring Eric Carle illustrations).

All that’s missing is a comfy cushion to snuggle up on and I have plans for that.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Obsession

Three years later and she still loves Eric Carle’s classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar:


February 2008


April 2008


August 2009 (playing with Matthieu and Christina who brought us the French version with them from France)


September 2009


October 2009 (reading the Pop-Up version with Alexis)


December 2009




January 2010


May 2010 (reading the French version with Alice)


December 2010 (reading the German version with Diane, a present toted from Germany for us)


January 2010 (reading the French version with Natalia)


“Reading” us her version of the book (such a fun coloring book!)