Baby's first stories

By Lilly Murray and Jane Foster, 2023

This book was a hit! It has four short, rhyming stories, each about a different animal. We came up with a little melody to which we would read them to Pemi and we all loved it. The story about the little elephant also came with fun ahdn gestures that enchanted him and made him giggle (the elephant squirted water in the air with her trunk!). The drawings are beautiful, black and white drawings. However! This is not a book for 0-3 months! This would have been completely meaningless to him then. What is a black and white drawing of a panda supposed to mean? It's just some squiggly lines! At 7-8 months when we read it to him I think he had a more developed sense for the abstraction of the shapes that the lines were trying to represent. Reading to Pemi has been a fascinating as we're learning what books are actually interesting and appropriate for a baby: images that seem like cute drawings to adults may still be way too complex for them as they don't know what they're looking at or what it's supposed to represent!

Baby's first stories

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