Our Favourite Picture Books - Why “Love Is My Favourite Thing” is our favourite thing.
We went through a bit of a library phase a while back. It so happens that there is a library just up the road from our studio and on a whim one day when I didn't want to hang around with the swiss balls giving me the guilt eye waiting for @swans05 to finish his training, I mozied on over with our son to kill some time.
I did give the adults sections a cursory glance as I passed them, but to be honest, we pretty much made a b-line for the kids books.
The thing is that kids picture books have a high consumption rate. You can easily go through 3 or 4, or more, books in a sitting and even though we have a lot of them, it doesn’t take long to find that you’re cycling through the same ones every week or so. Therefore, it was all, "Kids section, prepare yourself to be pillaged."
It was marvelous. All these books and we could take up to 50 at a time and keep them for 3 weeks. AHHHHH..It was like a heaven designed just for me! The only thing that could have made it better would be if the library also offered coffee and an endless supply of free donuts that also happened to have some sort of anti-weight gain properties about them. But they don’t.
Thirty (give or take) picture books gathered and we were out the door.
The best bit was that in the stack we had picked up a couple of gems which we fell in love with and re-borrowed for the next 2 borrowing cycles, meaning we had them for 9 weeks. Sorry all the other children from the library. We were so in love with these two books that we went a step further and sought them out and brought them, not just for ourselves, but additional copies for others as Christmas gifts.
I'm sorry we took all the books Matilda!
One of these books is the adorable Love Is My Favourite Thing by Emma Chichester Clark, a story about a little dog named Plum.
Don't even tell me you don't love Plummie just from the front cover of the book!
It's very easy to tell from reading the book that Plummie is a real dog, and Emma is her real ‘mummy’ because of the way she tells the story from Plum’s point of view. We get a very clear impression of Plummies personality and characteristics through her telling the story. Being the mummy of my own furbabes, and as any other dog lover and owner would know, they each have their own personality, just like people, and you have to know them deeply to be able to convey it to others in as delightful a way as Emma has done in this book.
The way the little black dog tells the tale is a perfect balance of a puppy and small child telling a story. Or at least in my mind, it's exactly how I imagine my dogs talk. She uses words like ‘Tiddlers’ and tells us how she loves a certain thing and how she knows all about them in the exact way my own almost 6 year old would talk. The innocence of Plummie, an inadvertent little mischief maker, shines in the eyes of my own full grown Labrador lap dog, who is still young enough to get up to all sorts of no good but then give me that, ‘I didn't mean it mummy, but do you still love me’ look when I tell her off.
Those pesky tiddlers, always dropping tasty treats right in our faces.
My son and I particularly love the illustrations, which are beautifully simple and capture the essence of Plum perfectly. There is a page where Plum has been sent to her room, so to speak, and the picture of this small black dog sitting alone in a dark room waiting for her people to come, unsure if they will still love her is conveyed in such an accurate way that it actually tugs on my heart strings every time I look at it. At times when my own two have gotten into some sort of ill thought out shenanigans, I can be about to lose it as I survey the contents of the rubbish bin flung from one end of the house to the other, and from nowhere this image somehow springs into my mind and I’m reminded of their innocence and the fact that nothing they do is ever malicious.
I'm sure I could hunt down photo's of our dogs doing all of these exact things if I had to.
Besides being a perfect book for those of us who love our pups, this is also a great book for parents and kids who aren’t particular animal lovers. The overall message of the story is that sometimes it's easy to forget to think things through before you do them and make a mistake, or possibly, complete chaos as it happens in our house, but no matter what you do, the people who love you, are always going to love you.
It might sound like a pretty obvious message, but the thing is that to a kid, it actually isn’t. Children need lots of reassurance and praise and encouragement and that’s partly because no matter how much of that we do, their funny little brains are still connecting the dots. Especially as school starts and the balance of what’s normal shifts for them again. This year I’ve reminded our son of the story of Plum a few times in reassurance that we know sometimes he stuffs up, but that will never make us think or feel differently about him and nothing will ever stop us from loving him.
Our favourite part of the day.
I highly recommend Love Is My Favourite Thing if you’re in the market for picture books for your own children or for gifts for others. It also has the obligatory inclusion of the word ‘poo’ in order to make it a sure-fire hit with any kid.
Until next time, dontbeanarsehat but DO be like a little black dog called Plum.
Brooke
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