Here are some more books that have entranced my family over the years!

Andrew Henry’s Meadow is one of the most treasured books from my own childhood. Doris Burn’s incredibly detailed and thoroughly imagined drawings seem matter-of-factly possible and yet completely extraordinary.
Andrew Henry annoys his family with his Rube-Goldberg-esque contraptions and inventions, and finally quietly runs away…

To build an amazing, transient outcast utopia for himself and his misunderstood friends. Each house is customized to the child’s quirky, frowned-upon hobby. I wanted desperately to live in the treehouse that Andrew Henry built for the girl whose farmer father hated the birds that she loved! We love any and all Maurice Sendak around here — I grew up on the Little Bear books, and Sonja loves them too… but she is endlessly enchanted and amused by In the Night Kitchen.
The surreal, kitchen-utensil cityscape of Mickey’s dreams has been a cheery vehicle for Sonja to reconcile the strangeness of dreaming with the real world.
And we love to holler the bakers’ crazy chants whenever we’re busy in our own kitchen!

The beautiful watercolors in Jon Muth’s Zen Shorts cause me to lose my place in the text and just go silent until Sonja reminds me what we are doing. These paintings make me want to drop everything and run to my easel – in fact, I’m pretty sure they have made me a better painter. The story might be about being here now, but look — here’s what color a shadow is when the sun is setting!
Three siblings befriend a panda who is fun, full of wisdom, and inexplicably lives alone in a big, bougie house in their neighborhood.
He helps them work through some familial discord by sharing some Lao Tzu… hey, doesn’t the sun almost hurt your eyes when you look up into that tree?