Tomie dePaola sheep adventures

A couple more books that we read before heading to the sheep shearing the other weekend were favorites by Tomie dePaola. Haircuts for the Woolseys is a gem we acquired at a local used bookstore. What a sweet little book! Charlie Needs A Cloak is another favorite that we borrowed from the library, although I'm convinced we own a copy if I could just unearth it...

In Haircuts for the Woolseys, the Woolsey children are dying to play outside in the lovely spring weather, although today is haircutting day.

The evening following the haircuts, a winter wind blows through and chills Fiddle-Dee-Dee Farms to the bone. Extra quilts are added to the sheep beds (isn't that adorable!)

And Granny settles in front of the fire for the evening.

The next day finds the Woolsey children playing outside in the spring snow with their new sweaters, knit from their own wool by Granny the night before. How adorable is that?!

In Charlie Needs A Cloak, Charlie clearly needs a new cloak as his old one is hanging in shreds over his shoulders.

After shearing his sheep...look at all those darling bald sheep!

And cleaning, carding and dyeing the wool...love that sheep barricading his wool from being dyed. :)

Charlie finally had a brand new beautiful cloak, courtesy of his sweet sheep. I love it!

Pelle's New Suit

As we were getting ready to visit shearing day at our favorite local farm, we dragged out a few of our favorite shearing books to get us in the mood. Right at the top of my list, one of my favorite Elsa Beskow books, Pelle's New Suit.

Elsa Beskow's renowned artwork is in it's element here on a little Swedish farm with the beautiful birch trees, colorful clothes, hillside homes and sweet animals.

I love the sheep-to-suit story here, but I also appreciate the way Pelle earns the work required to make his suit. He visits both grandmothers, his own mother, and a tailor working on their labor while they each help with a piece of his suit.

And the sweet scene of Pelle dyeing his wool makes me want to hitch up my own dyeing kettle. It's almost warm enough for that around here so maybe I should!

The end finds Pelle, not only thanking his own sheep for his fine new blue suit, but with all the labors who helped Pelle watching from the background. If only we knew the hands who give us the clothes on our backs. What a community to celebrate!

Ruth Krauss favorites

The first time I remember seeing this book was as an adult and it caught my eye because the boy on the cover so closely resembled the boy from my beloved The Little Fish That Got Away. There's a very good reason for that! It turns out that Crockett Johnson illustrated both books. Not only that, but he was married to Ruth Krauss, the author of The Carrot Seed, which is one of the longest published children's book. This lovely classic has been in print continuously since 1945!

Once I fell in love with the boy character similarity, I realized the text of the book is amazingly similar in style to the fishing book as well. I really like that simple repetitious text of many early children's books. It makes for a great first reading book.

The artwork is quite lovely in it's simplicity as well. I think you can really concentrate on the important points when you aren't bombarded by thousands of pictorial details on a single page. (Not that those books don't have their place too, as evidenced by Finn's love of Findus and Pettson.)

Another one of my favorite Ruth Krauss books is The Backward Day. Most children seem to love to see the ordinary turned extraordinary and having an entirely backward day is certainly extraordinary!

Finn giggles with glee when we get to the page where the boy puts his underwear on over his clothes. Oh, the humor of it all!

The illustration in this book is classic 1950s from the tablecloth to the hairstyles to the narrow variety of color. I love it! I also think it's very special to see the family of this little boy participate in his backward day and not just stare oddly at him. How refreshing for little readers to think they can mix up life and have their family joyously participate.

And "when backward day is done, backward day is done." And everyone just goes about their business like it's an ordinary day after all.

The Curious Cow

Many, many years ago, I began recalling a foggy memory of a book that I had as a child. I had vague recollection of a cow who kept getting into trouble, particularly when the cow went into the house startled the farmer's wife. The cow's name was at the tip of my brain but slightly repressed and I thought the farmer's name was Brown (which was wrong, it's actually Green). About 6 months ago, I finally remembered that the cow's name was Katy, which is a different enough spelling that the google search engine provided me with a book name: The Curious Cow.

The book was originally published in 1960 with the last publication in 1977 so it's clearly been out of print for many years, hence my trouble in locating a copy. I finally did locate a reasonably good copy in hardback, the kind used in school libraries. What a fascinating discovery, when the book finally arrived, to see that the first library date was from February, 1962.

A few of the pages feel a little fragile near the binding, but otherwise the book is in very good shape. It's also fascinating to me to hear the language describing Katy as a "good cow" or a "bad cow" when that kind of labeling is so foreign in modern children's picture books.

My favorite part of rediscovering this treasure from my childhood was the illustrations. I love the rough sketching and the bright swaths of color.

I love how expressive Katy's eyes are despite the rough sketching.

And I especially love seeing the eggs fall to the floor, Katy walking down the plank of wood, and Katy swimming in the hole, all parts of the story I vividly remember being captivated by as a child.

That's all. I'm not particularly recommending this book, although it's certainly worth the read if you ever stumble across it. This blog just wouldn't be a very good reflection of my opinion and taste in children's books without a mention of the book I spent so much of my childhood loving and so much of my adulthood searching for.

Little Blue Truck

Finn's most recent favorite, received for Christmas, is Little Blue Truck, about a sweet little farm truck named Blue. Blue has many little animal friends that help him along the way and an older big dump truck friend named Dump.

The lyrical verse and prevalence of onomatopoeias makes this book a fun read for the toddler and preschool set.

The illustrations are very sweet, with the right mixture of silliness and warmth. I especially like the splatter on the mud page, which looks so realistic, like most of the mud-splattered trucks in my own yard.

With a charming little moral message about friendship and kindness, the book is well-rounded and perfect tale for little ones.

You'll be cheering along with Blue and his little animal friends, especially the strong toad, when they ride away, covered in mud and hearts full of friendship.

The Tomtes of Hilltop Wood

We received The Tomtes of Hilltop Wood as a gift several months ago, and it quickly became one of Finn's favorite books. We always enjoy looking for tomte and gnome houses in the woods and Finn was so delighted to see the tomtes appear from the Hilltop Wood.

The children in the story learn that the workmen plan to put a road through Hilltop Wood and rush to tell the tomtes right away.

The children and tomtes work long and hard to thwart the road-building. Finn loved seeing how they would run the creek a different way, making the bridge useless or how they moved the protected bats to a different barn which stood in the workmen's way.

When winter comes and the children leave milk out for the tomte, Finn gets excited that it's "just like The Tomten".

The beautiful illustrations really capture the woods and the changing seasons beautifully. My favorite illustration is the little lighted window in the snow which captures the perfect amount of magic and imagination in the chilly wintertime scene.

then...one snowflake

Much like our day, the beginning of Snow centers around one snowflake (and a little boy's faith in snow). I really love the simplicity of the text in this little jewel of a winter book and the gorgeous illustrations certainly enhance the magic and beauty of the story.

My kids really enjoy the descriptions of the characters, like man with hat, boy with dog and woman with umbrella. (They also get a little tripped out by the wandering Mother Goose characters, which is a little random, in my opinion.)

I love the soft watercolor and ink look of the illustrations and the exaggerated features of the characters. The dreary gray really accentuates the solitary flakes in a wonderful way considering the text of the story.

At the end when the sky is finally a brighter blue, emphasizing the white piles of snow coating the world, you really get the sense that the boy's magic and happiness has coated the world as well.