Reviews for Because You Are My Baby

The average rating for Because You Are My Baby based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-04 00:00:00 Michel Devries I picked this up because I thought it would be a good fit for a blended family. Each page features an illustration of a different animal/baby pairing with accompanying narrative of the animal instructing the baby. On the skunk page you've got the parent skunk saying to the baby skunks "I'll walk a line for you to follow, snuggle with you in our hollow." The overall message is that I will teach you these things and do these things for you because you are my baby, and that relationship spans multiple species and types/shapes/looks/colors of families. Seemed like a great fit for a nontraditional family. Alas, I was disappointed by the second to last page where a white mother snuggles her white baby. Now it's not only not racially inclusive, but dads were cut out of the picture too. I don't expect all my books to showcase diversity, but this one was perfect for it, had so much potential for it, and lost it all on such a stereotypical depiction!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-16 00:00:00 Dannyj Helton This picture book doesn't have much in the way of a plot, but it follows the stories of different mothers telling their babies what they will do for them. Such as a mother coyote teaching her pup to sing, and a mother gopher watching her little ones play while they are outside and in an area of danger. The story shows the lengths of a mothers love. The pictures of the story are very detailed and look very life like. They show the mother and the babies on one side of the page and then on the opposite side, it has a little block of text that is centered and outlined in various pastel colors. The pictures also look like they are escaping their pages in certain places as tree branches or flowers stick out from the border line of the actual image. After a few pages of images with a block of text on the opposite side, the illustrations turn to full pages for the animal that is being explained. The story is very simple and easy to follow. It's target audience is obviously a much younger group, and it explains the depths of a mothers love. It's something children can relate to as they think about their own mothers and what they would do for them. The difference being that the majority of the story uses animals to portray human characteristics that we would do with our children. The very last two pages then switch to the mother and child being human. Using animals will engage the child more and then adding the humans at the end helps them apply what they learned from the animals to human abilities and attributes.