How many of you check out the bookshelves when you go over to other people’s houses? Our friends the Hambrechts’ bookshelves are overflowing! They love to read and they love to share their favorite books—they’ve gifted Junior with everything from a Pecos Bill compendium to D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths. When I heard that Kate disliked Put Me in the Zoo so much that she threw it across the room, I had to know more. . . so I asked her to write a guest post.

When I wrote about our Book Advent Calendar in December, we were only four books in. Below are reviews for the rest of the books. The real surprise for me was that we didn't finish the reading list--there were a lot of activities during the month which kept us out so late that we had to skip bedtime reading. I asked for reviews of the month's reading post-Christmas, and both Junior and my partner said that they want to do the Book Advent Calendar again next year. 

It’s the start of a new year! I always make New Year’s resolutions. Do you? This year, reading Dearie, a new biography of Julia Child, is spurring a resolution to learn a few go-to fancy salads this year. Bookwise, the year is just full of possibility. One of my friends has started a family book club which includes herself and her 6-year-old. I’m planning on following up on a book club invitation I received over the holidays, and also to look over the “Best of 2016” lists to come up with a reading list for 2017. Do you have any reading resolutions?

We get a lot of mail. Most of it’s junk, and disappointingly for Junior, almost none of it is for him. When Lego Club magazine shows up, it makes his day! He immediately sits down to read, only surfacing to request pencils or crayons or for me to take his picture right now with a Lego creation to send in to one of the magazine’s contests. Lego Club magazine has taken him from a beginning to an intermediate reader because he’s motivated to read it. Every page. In this blog post, I’ll talk about some other great magazines that will have your reader lunging for the mailbox—with links to sample issues and promo codes!

Google Maps puts each leg of our last road trip at 5.5 hours. Knowing this, I reserved two audiobooks from our local library. Crowdsourcing ideas brought up the following titles (hat tips to thoughtful friends Jen, Jen, Jessica, Lydia, and Midori) :

Advent calendars are an eagerly awaited part of the Christmas season at our house. Every year, faraway relatives gift us with the Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar. Junior can’t wait to dive into the day’s new activity, scene, or game. Junior also receives a Lego Advent Calendar. Breakfast can wait while he assembles the day’s mini Lego build. This year we’ve added a third: the book Advent calendar. I got the idea from the Cottage Mama: every day during Advent, you and your family read aloud a new Christmas-related book at bedtime. Below is our lineup for December—let me know if you have a favorite that we should include!

What prompted this post? Dinner. I've finally mastered homemade chicken soup, and the secret is alphabet noodles. Junior is so busy finding letters and numbers in his soup that the meal that he complained was "boring" minutes before dinner disappears with astonishing speed. This post details some of the funner ways I've found to reinforce alphabet learning.

We had no idea what we were getting into as a family when Junior showed an interest in trains at 18 months. We’ve played trains, read train books, watched train movies, gone on train rides, toured train museums… at one point, his friends’ parents were keeping train sets at their houses for him to play with when he came to visit. Below, I give you the lowdown on train books that we still like after many, many readings.

We really look forward to road trips for the opportunity they give us to listen to audiobooks. On our most recent trip, we visited the ocean floor and the outer reaches of the solar system, courtesy of  The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor and The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System. In the second segment of a two-part series, Michele Braun shares resources to help you beat the high cost of audiobooks--and some book recommendations--while highlighting the organizations bringing terrific literature to life.

The holidays are coming. Will you and your family be traveling? Do you have an audiobook already lined up? Michele Braun weighs in with a two-part take on the "Does listening to an audio book count as ‘reading’?” controversy and reveals some of her methods for locating inexpensive audiobook versions of her family's favorite reads.