This is one lovely, endearing book that expresses parents’ love towards their kids. I have a number of them, but I find the illustrations of Tim Warnes in “I love you to the moon and back” the most relatable to. It shows moments from day to day life of a bear and its cub that highlight the togetherness, playfulness and, generally, the close bond between young kids and parents. 

I don’t know how much little gosling gets from our “I love you”’s, but he gets that both bear and cub are happy. He also relates to the images and recognises in them things that we do together: He giggled with delight when he saw the bear carrying the cub on its shoulders; just how his daddy carried him on his shoulders when we went to the park and he got tired. The same with mommy doing “the horsie” for him or bathtime with daddy when he gets to splash and play around in the bathtub. I gently encouraged his imagination for some of the images – for the one in which the bears lie down and look at the skies above, I told him it’s just like when he’s breastfeeding to sleep at night.

Our favourite so far is the image of the bears touching noses. His look when we got to that page was precious: full of surprise and excitement. We had seen this before in other stories with animals and I had told him that is the way animals kiss. I asked him “do you want to do that?”. He lightened up, and with eyes wide open and a huge smile said “yeeeees”. And he came close to me with his cute, soft, little nose and we touched noses gently two-three times. He ran afterwards and did the same with daddy and so two-three more times back and forth. So heartwarming!