November 17, 2011

Our Best Book of the Library Haul: The Elephant and the Bad Baby

It was a very good week for library books this week, mostly because we showed up at the library on Monday not long after the librarian had replenished the featured book shelf, and then we took most of them. (Is this bad library etiquette? I’m never sure. Though even if I was, I’d do it anyway.) Stand-outs included the wonderful Dear Baobab by Cheryl Foggo, and Ella May and the Wishing Stone by Cary Fagan, and I think that if Harriet were older, either one of these would have taken the prize. But because Harriet is only 2, our best book of the week was not from the featured shelf at all, it was The Elephant and the Bad Baby by Elfrida Vipont and Raymond Briggs, which we turned up while hanging out in the stacks in the vicinity of Judith Viors and Bernard Waber.

The Elephant and the Bad Baby delights the parts of us that worship all things Albergh, and we think that Alan and Janet must have read this one back in the day. I love it most because just why the baby is “the bad baby” is never really explained (except once where he doesn’t say please), because I love elephants, and because when the elephant runs down the street, it goes, “rumpata, rumpata, rumpata” (of course!). The baby and the elephant run through town stealing things from shopkeepers, from sausages to lollypops (and maybe this is why the baby is the bad baby? Though the elephant really led him on), and being chased by the shopkeepers (some bearing cleavers), and then they all sort of work it out and end up back at the bad baby’s house where his mother makes them pancakes, and they sit around the table with a big teapot in the middle. Also, the elephant is drinking milk from a bucket, which Harriet finds no end of fascinating.