Thank you for the books!

Since we first announced to friends and family that we were adopting, we have received some wonderful books for our baby. I thought I should share some of them here.

I am super excited to use signs with our child. I know that many people do and I've been inspired by the amount children can communicate before they are actually talking. My parents' good friends, Marian and Sam, sent us this book this past summer. It was our baby's first present.



This is actually a book that Nick and I bought for the baby. (At the same time we got our first Vietnamese cookbook!) I hope to collect several Vietnamese Folk Tales. So, if you know of other good ones, please let me know.



My friend, Emily, got this book for us. It was a surprise package and a great book. The best part is that John McCutcheon's lyrics and music are included so we'll be able to sing along as we read.

This is a recent present from Ben, our baby's second cousin. We just finished reading it this morning and I know it will be a helpful book as questions arise and we tell (and retell) the story. It will be interesting to see how similar it will be to our own child's story or our journey to Vietnam. I like that it is factual, but with different possibilities. It will be nice to discuss the general and specific details with our child of how this story and their own intersect. Ben is very excited about meeting our baby because he lives just up the road and they will most likely be very close friends!

Also from Ben, a great board book in Vietnamese! Although there are some strong hints as to what the words might say, we really can't read it yet and even if we think we know what it says, we need to figure out the pronunciations. So....that gives us something to work on in the next few months. I really want to learn some Vietnamese before we meet our baby. If you know of any good books or other tools, please pass them on!


This book was the book of choice in our family this year! I saw it opened three separate times this past week! We received it as a present from my parents. What is most exciting to me is that the woman who wrote and illustrated this book (Ingrid Hess) is illustrating my mom's book which will be coming out sometime this year. It will be the fifth children's book that my mom has published. The first four were in the 1980s and were collaborations with my aunt Marilyn.

In addition to these, we've received some great 2nd-hand Dr. Suess books and a few more signing books. For years my mom would get us a children's book for each of our birthdays. She has stopped doing that in recent years, but we have a great collection of books because she always looked for books related to our personal interests.