cooking with henry and elliebelly

I thought Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly would be a perfect book for Nate since he is so into cooking and baking at the moment. Plus he loves to do culinary and product demos as if he's in front of a camera. That's SO his generation.

Henry and his little sister Elliebelly make raspberry-marshmallow-peanut butter waffles with barbecued banana bacon on their cooking show. Elliebelly’s irrepressible toddler ways make for unpredictable and boisterous fun. Henry, by the way, is an exceptionally patient older brother. 😉 There's something about Dan Yaccarino's retro illustrations that I love and just keep coming back to (we have some of his other works as well). His Elliebelly is a pretty masterful depiction of a toddler. Those red curls are out of control.

last stop on market

I'm trying to catch up on all the incredible children's lit published in 2015 and am finally, finally getting around to reading Last Stop on Market Street by Matt De La Peña and Christian Robinson.  It’s beautiful on so many levels.

And it reminds me of when I lived in San Francisco and used to take the F or J line up Market Street with my flatmate on the weekends to wherever it was that we were going.  An idea struck us one day.  We would ride a bus or Muni car from the beginning of the line all the way to the end, and with a tape recorder in hand, would ask people where they were going and why.  We would find some revelatory common thread that would weave everyone’s narrative together.  Then we would send it in to This American Life and hopefully, in our wildest dreams, they would air it on one of their shows and we’d get to hear Ira Glass introduce our segment in his endearing cadences.  Well, we never got around to our audio story.  Perhaps too much of our time went to studying, eating our way through the city (when we had the money), and listening to The Shins and Iron and Wine.  Am I dating myself? lol  Anyway, that was a big tangent, and didn't have too much to do with the beautiful story and message of Last Stop on Market Street, but I love how books evoke memories, like this one.

little lit book series: summer edition

Elisha Cooper’s Beach is summer encapsulated in his characteristic lovely and poetic watercolors.  For today’s #littlelitbookseries, we’re celebrating the upcoming warm and lax season of summer, the time where the pace of life slows down even just a little bit and we have more moments to sit and reflect on all that’s happened so far in the year.

“Away to the beach!  Away to sand and salt water, to rolling dunes and pounding waves.  Away to swimsuits and sunscreen, to lying on towels and listening to the sound of the ocean.  As the day begins, the beach is empty, waiting to be filled.“

Elisha Cooper on Beach: “I did most of the drawings for this book on Lake Michigan. Our home in Chicago was near the lake, and I’d go there with my daughters to play and swim, and sketch bathers. Since there are salty aspects to beaches, I flew back East and sketched seaweed and crabs. I remembered beaches I loved when I was young, from Fire Island to Cape Hatteras. Then I put all these sketches together into one summer day at the beach. So the beach in this book looks like the Hamptons but has Midwestern roots (the lighthouse here is at the head of the Chicago River). Even a city beach has details that make a beach a beach: sand, seagulls, and bathers in funny swimsuits.”

Take a look at everyone else’s summer posts in #littlelitbookseries on Instagram.