Pets in our house is a weekly topic. Usually consisting of one of the children asking for one, and me saying no! With a large family and both my husband and I having allergies to a lot of animals a fish is our limit.
My lovely Mother saved the day last year by getting a dog so that the children can have a furry friend at her house. They were completely over the moon and love her to bits, but as children do number four can be slightly to affectionate and tries to drag the poor thing around by her tail, dress her up and just be continually in her way.
When I was approached by aspiring author Lee Hunter to review her new children’s book Nemo And Giraffe I jumped at the chance as the ethos behind the first in a series of books she is hoping to publish is about building positive relationships with pets.
Her background as a childminder for under fives with a house cat herself started her on the path to encourage children to treat animals as equals and understand that we can all be friends no matter what we look like or where we came from.
I sat down with number four to share this story with him the other day. He is quite fussy when it comes to books as he has a few favourites that tend to get read time and time again, but he was drawn to the brightly coloured, cute charters drawn by Lindy Damen. Lee has set the book out so that it is very easy for the children to build a rapport with the main characters Nemo and Giraffe. He quickly grasped the idea Lee was trying to get across about us all being different and I could then relate to to ourselves and the animals in our life that he comes across.
I would highly recommend this book which you can easily pick up on Amazon for a very reasonable £4.99. You can follow Nemo and Giraffe on Twitter and Facebook. We will be following them and waiting for their next adventure.
I was sent Nemo and Giraffe in a PDF format to share with my children. All of my reviews are of my honest opinion and I only take on products that are relevant to myself and my family.
In our house there is always a big dilemma about costume choice in the weeks leading up to World book week. It’s not unusual for around twenty characters to be considered and rejected before we finally choose. Thankfully this year I only had one to dress and we finally came up with Wanda ( Where’s Wally’s girlfriend) without to many problems.
This got me thinking about the whole concept of World Book Day and reflecting on a family holiday in The Gambia when I was a child. I remember being astounded that the children there could not go to school unless they had their own pens and paper. Being a fairly typical ten year old child who’d moan and groan every morning about getting up for school, I remember being shocked by the Gambian children’s hunger for learning.
I’m not sure how much they understood but from now on we will donate to The Book Bus each World Book Day as a reminder of just how privileged we are and that we mustn’t take our access to education and a good book for granted.