Valerie Wyatt

My son and I just loved editor and author Valerie Wyatt’s How to Build Your Own Country which I reviewed in the November 2009 issue of L.A. Parent. We spent countless hours discussing that book so when I received a copy of Welcome to the World ($14.95, Kids Can Press, ages 0-3 ) written by Valerie Wyatt with photographs by Lennette Newell, I knew it would be terrific, too. In just 24 pages, half of them adorable close-ups of babies, animals and nature, the author succeeds in capturing the emotions a parent feels and wishes to share with their child.  It begins perfectly with:

Dear Baby,
Welcome to the world
and all its wonders.

You will feel the sun on your skin
and be warmed by it.

And ending no better way than with:

You will be loved.

While this is not a board book and so must be handled more carefully with infants, reserve it for bedtime when the endearing messages can be firmly planted in a little one’s heart just before nodding off.