Some of my kids’ books are great, and some are less than stellar. I know my standards are probably too high, yet I’m still pleasantly surprised by some of the books strewn about their play area. Susan Boynton’s books, for example, are almost all awesome, and if you’re a parent of a kid anywhere close to the age range of mine, you’re probably nodding in agreement. They’re illustrated well, the meter of the verse is usually pretty solid, and there are sometimes little twists that make me smile (or even laugh out loud once – I know, that’s some serious shit right there).
But I don’t expect too much from the less ambitious ones. If it’s something like “Baby’s First Words,” they should be able to correctly put a picture of a shoe under the word “shoe,” and that’s not normally a problem. Actually, now that I think about it a little more, there is one small book of colors that has a mostly green apple on the page that’s supposed to illustrate “Red.” I think that’s some minor bullshit right there, but I have a new one that gets my goat a wee bit more.
“Numbers” is a small board book with a whopping six pages. Hard to mess that up, right? Page one shows a picture of a teddy bear, the number 1, and the words, “One teddy bear.” Pretty easy formula to follow, you might expect. Two shoes are on the page that faces that one, also with the appropriate text. Turn the page, and you’ll find three cupcakes and four cars waiting for you. So far so good, eh? But here’s where things go awry. The first time I turned the page, I was reading the book aloud to my kids. As I was saying, “Five fingers” and pointing to the splayed hand on the page, I couldn’t help but notice a foot waiting for me on the subsequent page. I actually had time to think to myself, “Nah, that can’t be right.” Sure enough, I moved over to the final page of the book and read aloud, “FIVE toes.” Yep, you read that right. The six-page book of numbers goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5. Why the hell would they do that? It’s not like they needed to find something inextricably tied to the number six (like fingers are to five), because that’s not the case with three cupcakes, four cars, or…any of the others, actually. So it could’ve been six of anything – flowers, blueberries, rattles, babies, or virtually anything not R-rated. It’s like someone said, “Ya know, we had such a good feeling about 5 being fingers that maybe we should just try to replicate that success instead of pushing ourselves to find a good pairing for number 6.” Ok, sure, that could make a tiny bit of sense…if it weren’t a fucking counting book with only six pages. My kids are going to think that the number 5 follows the number 5 unless I step in and stop the nonsense myself. I really have no idea how it got published with what I consider to be a giant flaw, but I know one thing: that’s bullshit.