Saturday, October 11, 2008

Surprises!

Just picked up a voicemail from my brother letting me know that Surprises! - a toddler counting book from my own childhood - is Clara's favorite book. She gets Lee to read it to her at bedtime and naptime, and my brother apparently read it to her 3 or 4 times in a row yesterday.

It is about 10 pages long, with one sentence per page, and about a centimeter of the bottom of each page is visible all at once - shortest page is on top for a stacking effect. It starts with something like, "Marvin Moose sees something funny." You flip the page up to see a single creature with very long legs (reaching across the bottom of each page) and a question such as "Is it one [adjective + name of creature]?" You keep flipping pages up to re-interpret the image that peeks through on the bottom and to add another creature to be counted... until we find at the very end that "it seems/ They are all part of the elephant's dreams!"

I loved this book as a kid (does it show?) and am thrilled that Clara likes it too. I'm sure it's out of print by now - I couldn't find it on amazon or google.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You can also try alibris and abebooks. I'm going to see if I can find it for Clare. She is a big fan of ribbon books and this sounds like it might be similar in concept.