Celebrations and Page Turners

I thought I would mention that Matt and I are celebrating seven years of married life this week!  Matt came home with these on our anniversary and they have been adding a little cheer to our kitchen ever since.

I also want to wish Matt's dad a happy, happy birthday.  He so graciously agreed seven years ago to share his birthday with our wedding day.

Ok, so from anniversaries and birthdays to books.  We have been hitting the local libraries lately and have managed to find some really great books.  So good, in fact, that I thought I would share what we are reading.

We have been talking and doing a little planning for our spring garden and so we decided to take a trip to the library at The Birmingham Botanical Gardens.  There we found the book How Groundhog's Garden Grew by Lynne Cherry.

It is a great story about a groundhog who, after being caught by a squirrel taking things from the squirrel's garden, learns how to plant his very own garden.  Hannah loved this book so much that we read it every night for about two weeks.  I actually brought this book with me the other day to read to Hannah's class.  I was the Mystery Reader at her school, which means that I surprised her and her classmates by coming to school and reading to them.  It was so much fun seeing the look on Hannah's face when I walked through her classroom door and she loved sharing this book with her friends.

(I should probably mention that it was also pajama day at school.) I brought along a planted lima bean for each child so that they could watch a plant start to grow at home.  Our little bean is really growing...

The illustrations in this book are beautiful and Hannah especially loved the pages describing insects...

and the pages illustrating different veggies from little sprout to ready to pick.

Every time we read the book we had to stop at these pages and name each insect or each vegetable and exactly what was occurring.  It is a good thing the groundhog saw his shadow this year because I think this little one is ready to garden!

Next up is the book The Big Snow by Berta and Elmer Hader.

It is a Caldecott winner and we chose this book in anticipation of one of our recent snow days.  It is a great book about what animals do during the winter, whether it is hibernate, migrate or just stay put.

This is a fun book because Hannah really notices now which animals are around when we take walks....crows, squirrels, cardinals, etc.  It is also fun to talk about who is sleeping under the ground in our very own backyard.

Lastly, one of our very favorite books that we happened upon at the library is Can You Hear It?.  (sorry for the bad picture but it is in a plastic sleeve)

I love this book so much that I am thinking about buying it for our home library.  Can You Hear It? is a "listen and look" book that was put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The book shows 13 pictures and each image corresponds with a piece of music on the CD that comes with the book. So for instance, Hannah and Lily looked at a Japanese print of a bee hovering over flowers while listening to The Flight of the Bumblebee. 

Each image has guided questions and a CD track number that told us exactly what sounds to listen for in the music.  It really is great!

Ok, so I feel a little like the guy from Reading Rainbow (one of my very favorite shows growing up by the way) but these are some of our very favorites right now and I wanted to remember what types of books I am reading to Hannah and Lily. We would love to know what you are reading too so let us know if you have a suggestion for what we should check out on our next library visit.