Great books for babies

This is the first in a new feature here: books that we love.

From the very first day (literally!), we have been reading to Miss Leyba. David and I both love to read ourselves and sharing books with our daughter has been such a blessing for our family. We’ve so enjoyed watching her develop a love of books:

We have found that board books are a godsend. No paper cuts. No tearing (though she’s only done this a few times). No bent pages. No ruined pages because of all the drool. And the occasional bites.

Board books are (more) sturdy.

Nowadays most baby books come in this format and I strongly recommend you search them out when buying presents for little ones. After a few months, we packed up all the non-board children’s books –because she terrorized the hell out of them–and have only now (at almost a year old) started reintroducing them to her.

There are also small, thick, sturdy board books which are especially good for teething on, if you can get paste the whole baby chewing on cardboard (which I personally prefer to baby chewing on plastic–eck!). We especially like these Eric Carle ones, which come in a set of three small books:

They feature words from some of Eric Carle’s books like The Very Busy Spider and The Very Hungry Caterpillar:

We like these because we can read (or tell!) the longer story that these words were excerpted from while Miss Leyba plays with the smaller book; they are highly portable (I always have a few in my purse); the pages are extra thick which makes them very easy to turn; and they are fairly hard to rip apart, though after about 8 months of use ours are finally starting to beat the dust.

With them we practice animal names, animal sounds, colors, and spelling (i.e., D-O-G). We stack them up like blocks and knock them down. They are endlessly fun to play with.

The original books are pretty great too.