8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. As I’ve said before, you can choose a hand-stitched Waldorf doll or tone-on-tone felted owl from Etsy for your child, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Resign yourself to pink plastic or, perhaps, a color-blocked polyester velour dog. Phoebe was given to Arianna when she was very small by the family’s nanny, Lili. Both Arianna and her little sister Caroline adore Phoebe and love to dress her in brightly patterned outfits which further enhance her primary colors. She has lost limbs and her nose repeatedly over time, but Lili always lovingly sews Phoebe up as good as new. The books in this portrait belonged to the girls’ father when he was a child and in turn became favorites of Arianna and Caroline. This set of four by Maurice Sendak is called “The Nutshell Library,” and includes “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “Pierre,” “Alligators All Around,” and “One Was Jonny.” I have written about “Chicken Soup With Rice” in a past post, as it is the one book that I read every single night to my own daughter and was a huge part of my own childhood! This painting is one of two portraits commissioned by Heidi of her daughter’s favorite things. You can see my portrait of Caroline’s Lammy here.
Tag: sendak
Bedtime Books
Forget Goodnight Moon. I’m here to tell you that the most hypnotic, soothing book ever written is Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months. There is no eating of chicken soup going on in our mostly-vegetarian household, but nearly every night I knock my daughter out with this collection of twelve sweetly surreal little rhymes.
This copy survived a similar role in my own childhood. Researching the book just now, I notice that Carole King evidently made it into a song, but I refuse to listen to it! I just don’t want anything to displace the way it has always sounded to me.
I suspect you won’t often find this on the Golden Book rack at your grocery store, although it was reprinted in 2008. Another gem from my 1970’s youth, Little Mommy paints a scandalously outdated portrait of motherhood. And yet I read it to Sonja all the time. She is not at all confused or suprised by its cliches, because it perfectly mirrors our own day-to-day existence. I’m at home washing dishes, clothes, and babies, and Daddy is off at work. I was once a modern woman – how did this happen? At any rate, the pictures are gorgeous…
…so I just try to provide a little context as I read. Also, the little girl looks just like Sonja. 
I am a new convert to The Pigeon. Many friends have tried to hype the Mo Willems Pigeon books to me, but Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus was read to us at a library storytime in a very uninspired manner, and I just wasn’t having any more of it. And then, after battling later and later bedtimes with Sonja, I picked up Don’t Let The Pigeon Stay Up Late. Although it does nothing to help her sleep, we have a ball re-reading this page a bazillion times: 
Children’s Book Week! Some Favorites
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?