Happy Children's Book Week To You!

In the Ford household, we've celebrated three birthdays, one First Communion, and Mother's Day (happy, happy!) all within the last month.  Heaven forbid we should rest on our laurels, so let's keep the party going with Children's Book Week!

In our next series of posts, the Teaching Authors are planning to share titles of beloved childhood books that have sadly been lost to the ages (loaned, tossed, or otherwise lost).  This is a timely topic for me, as my newly minted eight-year-old asked me last week for new reading suggestions.  We trekked together to the attic, where my childhood books are stored.  As an Army brat with at least 25 moves under my belt, I possess very few relics of my childhood -- toys, treasures, clothes, memorabilia.  But books, I was smart enough to schlep and save. 

I've got Charlie Brown's Super Book of Questions and Answers and the complete Bobbsey Twins (which, alas, I do not feel I can share with my daughter today, what with  Dinah and Sam and Flossie, her father's "little fat fairy" (goodness!)).  However,I pulled together a pile of about 12 books, old and new, that I think she will love.  I also did a quick and painful assessment of what I thought I had that I do not:
The Moffatts series by Eleanor Estes
Figgs and Phantoms and The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues by Ellen Raskin
Most of the All-of-A-Kind family series
Anything by E.B. White (!)
And, for when my daughter is older:
Waiting for Johnny Miracle by Alice Bach
A House Like a Lotus by Madeleine L'Engle

I am thankful that old and/or out-of-print books are now typically available on the Internet, though I suspect some of these will be hard to find.  I plan to get these books into my daughter's hands or die trying.

Happy Children's Book Week (and month and year) to all!  And if you haven't already done so, it's not too late to enter our Blogiversary Contest to win one of four gift certificates to Anderson's Bookstore.  Happy Book Buying to All! --Jeanne Marie