Children's Book Week: Mo Is the Man

For Children's Book Week, I am going to try to blog about a different book or author every day.

I find that when I go to the children's section of the library, I tend to seek out certain authors. One of my most sought-out authors is Mo Willems. Mo is known for books like Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and Knuffle Bunny, but my favorite of his books is Leonardo, The Terrible Monster, which is all about a monster who wants to be scary but just isn't. My favorite bit in it is how he really wants to "scare the tuna salad out of" some kid. Is that how monsters think? I don't know. In any case, most of the books have a bit of warped humor to them that is appealing to people like me.

I also quite enjoyed Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct, which has the same sort of weirdness as a recent favorite, Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed. I especially like reading the naked mole rat book to Emmett when he's resisting our attempts to put clothes on him.

Mo is both author and illustrator for his books, and long before Emmett was born, I read and was inspired by some of his thoughts on drawing in this NPR piece. I was thinking about it again recently. Specifically, I was thinking about what our babies see us doing in an average day and what effects that may have.