After attending my first real “story time” at the library with my son, I felt as if I had stumbled upon the great renaissance of my entire life. There were so many amazing stories! For starters, Â I had never heard of the book “Goodnight Moon,” until I heard it for the first time at story time, as an adult. Â That was a revelation right there and then. Â We would check out stacks and stacks of books, and I fell in love with the narratives, just as much as the illustrations. Pumpkin Moonshine, To Market, To Market, Blue Bowl Down, Owl Moon, My Lucky Day… and I found myself sitting on the sofa, opening up the pages just to “see what happened,” long after the boys went to sleep. Treasures, they were.
The bonus was having something to do, together, with the boys, that we both LOVED. We would spend hours going through the stacks of books.
One of my fondest memories is opening up the pages of Arthur Geisert’s “After the Flood,” and watching how Geisert’s imagination unfolded onto the page, re-creating how life was re-born as the waters receded.
If you remember correctly, the Ark landed on the top of a mountain. So, Noah and his family decided to move down the mountain to the fertile land below. To do this, they cut trees and built a
slide to move the ark down the mountain.
Noah, his family, and the animals all worked together.
Why, you might be wondering, would they need to bother with that heavy ark?
The answer is enchanting…
The book illustrates how the roof was removed from the top of the ark, and the ark was turned over to make a shelter. It would become their home!
The ending, like all children’s story books, is just as comforting and reassuring:
At night, stories were read to the children and to the animals…
Of course they were…And, I just checked out a whole stack of Geisert books to read with my kids. What could be a better Mother’s Day present?