I thought the vocabulary was too advanced for 1-2  year olds, but little gosling enjoys it and he finishes the verses on his own by now. The illustrations are very playful and remind me of “Cars”. The Crane Truck going to sleep holding a tiny teddy bear and Cement Mixer taking a shower and covering himself with the tiniest and cutest little blanket are so precious. And I love the message it sends that work, however hard, is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. All machines are so happy (and tired) at the end of day and little gosling quickly picked up on it. 

Going past construction sites, we always stop and watch the different machines. He likes to look at them and recognises them from the book; he wishes they would move and when they do, he is oftentimes scared. Just today one excavator suddenly started moving in the direction where we were standing and he immediately said “bye bye” very alarmed and off we went.

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We have fun when we read this book together. Little gosling likes the boy’s panda (currently one of the top favourite animals), so he is carefully looking for him and pointing him on every page. He is very empathetic to the sad boy, sadness and happiness being the two emotions he has been learning to identify these days. He is eagerly looking for the dragonflies, because he loves the Romanian word for it, “libelula” (he knows that’s the book where he first saw it) and he has been copying the illustrator’s way of drawing the sun. It suits his level of ability and he draws that kind of sun over and over again in many different colours, even black :))). 

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Little gosling had a phase when he was turning the pages straight to the Emperor penguins in Antarctica. He loved penguins. Then, after playing with a toy camel at his granny’s place, he would go to the desert page. After spending time in the countryside, collecting the eggs laid by the hen, he would look with interest at how chicks hatch from eggs. He laughs at the jungle page, where a parrot loudly shrieks “sqwak”, roars pointing at the tiger and makes me sing Culture Beat’s Karma Chameleon when he sees the chameleon, swinging his head from side to side to the rhythm. Also, it is the only book we have with bats and fireflies and crocodiles , and the lift the flap surprise at the end of the book generates excitement every time. 

Some weeks ago, we were naming animals and out of nowhere he points to the crocodile, saying its name with a different accent and starts clapping his hands . It could not be Romanian, there was no context for it. Thus, it must have been something he had learnt at the nursery. He’s been going to a nursery in French since last November. The next day, when I picked him up at the nursery, I asked whether they had been singing a song about crocodiles, and that is how I came to learn “Ah les crocodiles”, which we now sing as part of the daily round-up of nursery rhymes. Thank God for youtube !

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