Pretty Pictures ~ Yu Rong

   Yu Rong was so right in choosing a Chinese painting technique to bring to life all the splendor and adoration that surrounds one of the world's most beloved creatures- pandas.  Each page is feathered with Nick Dowson's soft verse that slips in educational morsels, "High on a mist-wrapped mountain, cradled in a leafy nest, a mother panda holds her newborn cub gently in her giant paw." 

   But Rong's captivating brush paintings in Tracks of a Panda made me markedly pause and then dissolve into the mystical world of these endangered beauties.

Special Sights ~ Reading Rainbow

   A few weeks ago, Soleil Moon Frye and LeVar Burton were guests on my favorite late-night talk show, Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.  Before Andy could even introduce them, I started singing Reading Rainbow's theme song and remembering all the times I sat glued to the schoolday dramas and wholesome lessons of Punky Brewster while scheming a way to leave the house in brightly colored, mis-matched shoes.

Pretty Pictures ~ Elisa Kleven

   Elisa Kleven's kaleidoscopic collage illustrations in Abuela y Isla really bring to life the sentimental adventures of a girl and her abuela (grandmother).  With a sprinkle of Spanish vocabulary and a heaping, whimsical geography lesson, we soar over Manhattan and San Juan into the creative mind of Rosalba.

This is your brain.

   After making it through two pregnancies, two births, two baby-phases, and attempting to make it through the second terrible, horrible, no good, very bad-two phase, I have had some dark mommy moments...similar to the scene in Sex and the City 2 when Little Girl is baking cupcakes and Lily smacks huge red handprints on her white Valentino skirt and she has a mommy meltdown in the pantry where the hot nanny finds her crying...only mine are minus the Valentino, and the cupcakes, and the nanny, and the gorgeous, immaculate pantry...but always include the crying.