Early Morning Birding

By our front window Miss Leyba and I set up this basket with bird guides and Miss Leyba’s binoculars (more on those tomorrow) so we can easily watch and identify birds together. Through the window we have a great view of the blackberry bushes, a dead tree, and an open field, all areas that the birds love to frequent for food and shelter. Next to the basket, we have a poster of common feeding birds found here in Western America that my mom bought for Miss Leyba.

Some of the bird guides in our basket:
The Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America (containing over 130 bird songs!)
Birds of California Field Guide (Our Nature Field Guides)
Birds (Fandex Family Field Guides)
Field Guide to the Laguna de Santa Rosa
Western Trailside Birds (Peterson Flash Guides)

Often in the early mornings, we sit by the open window and listen to the birds. We watch birds chase each other, fly about exploring our neighborhood, and care for each other. All spring we watched a pair of robins care for their young living in the birch tree in our front yard.

Together we love observing the natural world.

Biologist in the making?! (Like Mama! It runs in the family.) We shall see.

Pardon Miss Leyba’s pajamas and adorable bed head! I didn’t think you’d mind.

Story Time with Miss Leyba

Please join us for story time!

Miss Leyba loves reading her books aloud! Not only does she like to sit in our laps for story time, but she frequently reads aloud to herself (and to anyone else who will listen!). She is especially partial to reading in bed, something David and I are quite fond of too.

Since we read to her every day, and often read the same books over and over again at her request, she has several favorites memorized (such as Goodnight Moon, The Hungry Caterpillar, and I’m as Quick as a Cricket); here are two others for your enjoyment.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?


Video: Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? from Carrie on Vimeo.

Where’s Spot?


Video: Where is Spot? from Carrie on Vimeo.

We could read and discuss books all day.

Oh, yeah, we frequently do.

What books are you enjoying right now?

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.