Animal books

We like shopping for our nieces (or other baby/kid friends) at Borders. They’re pretty helpful to people like us with nice big signs showing books for age ranges. If you’re not up with the play on the latest ‘reader series’ for a particular child or know their favourites it can be quite daunting trying to choose something age-appropriate.

Yesterday’s plan was to get a book for Sarah, who’s turning 4, that features a penguin. Well. There actually wasn’t a section for 4-8 year olds, and we figured that 4 is no longer a toddler, and board books are for babies so we were at a bit of a loss. We know that Pingu is on the right track so went to the ‘Characters’ section but couldn’t find Pingu anywhere amongst stories of Maisie, Miffy, Thomas and friends.

So we headed to the ‘picture books’ bit. It soon became apparent that there we books about every kind of animal except penguins! We even sectioned up the shelves and systematically scanned, calling out to each other the animals we found – at one stage I was crawling along the floor reading out the animals I came across in books along the bottom shelf (god only knows what the other shoppers thought of us) but honestly, no penguins? Dogs, cats, dinosours, gruffalos (what?), wombats, giraffes, bears (lots of bears), tigers, wild things, alligators, bunnies, possums, monkeys, fish, kiwi, ducklings, mice, elephants and a potty (!!). We did find one adventure story about a penguin at sea but it was a bit scary and then the Mister stumbled upon this fantastic book – which we read aloud to each other to test it out, yes in the store where everyone could hear.

How big is a million? We figure it’s got penguins in it AND is educational so hopefully can’t go wrong. And the poster in the back which supposedly has a million stars on it is actually amazing, even through an adult’s eyes.