Books of the Day: My Dog and My Cat

I Like Cats
Author:  Patricia Hubbell
Illustrator:  Pamela Paparone
Cheshire Studio (2003)

The Perfect Puppy for Me
Author: Jane O'Conner and Jessie Hartland
Illustrator:  Jessie Hartland
Viking (2003)

I have been so excited to write this entry because, really, I need to vent about my cat, Pololo,  and  my dog, Tama.  I love my pets, but they are both getting very old.  According to our vet,  Pololo is living on borrowed time.  Tama has become arthritic and loud.   She has this way of humming and snoring in her sleep that has always been endearing, but now is loud and annoying. 

 There is nothing worse than putting Mirette back to sleep after a nightmare, to be almost there, and then hear a rumbling at the door.  Tama lumbers in and breathes loudly, tossing and turning, or whimpering to go outside.   In those moments, I feel something close to hatred. 

Meanwhile, Pololo has started to cry in the middle of the night.  Our vet thinks it's because she is old and disorientated.  It's the most mournful and pitiful sound.

I need to remember why I love them and how they have been there for me through thick and through thin for many many years.  So I thought I would pick a cat book in honor of the great Pololo and a dog book in honor of the beautiful copper-colored Tama.

My cat book, I Like Cats is a recent find that is super adorable.   It's a simple rhyming book with big, colorful pictures of cats.  But what won me over is the Title page with a line-up of cats much like a montage of school photos.  Each cat has a name like Otto, Rusty, Whiskers and Pickle Jones.  We shared a lot of giggles over the funny names and it tapped into Mirette's recent interest in naming everything.

Patricia Hubbell is a poet and children's book author from Connecticut.  She loves horses and seems very accessible to kids.   http://www.kidspoet.com/aboutme.htm.  There is not much out there about Pamala Paparone.


The Perfect Puppy For Me is great fun and very busy.  It's about a boy who loves dogs and is trying to choose a breed.   He talks about all the different types of dogs he knows.  This is interspersed with facts about the breed of dog and facts about dogs in general.   The illustrations remind me a lot of Maira Kalman (and if you have been reading my blog, you know that she is a favorite of mine!).  

Mirette has only recently been distinguishing subsets within categories.   Only just recently she realized that dogs can be poodles or bulldogs.  Before,  they were all just dogs.   So this is a great book for expanding a preschoolers knowledge of dogs.

The book is written by Jane O'Connor who has a dog named Lucky and works in the children's literature field as an editor.   As I was researching this I found out that she also wrote the Fancy Nancy series.   What a powerhouse!! She has also written books with her husband and her son.   http://biography.jrank.org/pages/447/O-Connor-Jane-1947.html

Jessie Hartland illustrates books and also sells prints, ceramics, watches and other products.   Here's her link:  http://www.jessiehartland.com/