B is for Baby

See the baby
The baby is fat
The baby is pink
The baby can cry
The baby can laugh
See the baby play

Play, baby, play.

Pretty, pretty, baby.

Mommy loves the baby
More than she loves you.

I don’t think I let my parents see it.

I bought my own copy years later and it sits proudly on my humor shelf.

If ever on a bicycle
You careen along the hallway,
And your dad all of a sudden
Steps in your path from the loo,
Please don’t turn into the kitchen –
There’s a hard fridge in the kitchen.
Better use Dad as a cushion,
Dad is soft. He will forgive.

(Can’t sign in for some reason, bah.)

How exactly are we defining “subversive kids’ literature?”

“G is for Gigolo”

Definitely not a children’s book.

(Laughs)

The second is the idea that this isn’t for kids. I can’t imagine who would delight in this more than kids. The sticker on the front, “A Primer for Adults Only” can only add to the appeal. Genius! The only trick is figuring out when they are old enough to get the jokes (kind of like Monty Python that way. I have no doubt my boys would enjoy them at 8 and 10, but I want to maximize their joy.)

There is a quote in a Kurt Vonnegut book about banned books. Something about how every school library allows the two most subversive books, Robin Hood and the New Testament.

This story appears to be the influence for the MGMT song “Kids”.

Or H for horsepower, so go pour some sugar in your dad’s gas tank to feed the pony?

aaaaah, I loved that book.

The problem is super duper ultraduper safety mentality today that gets worse and worse even though we are a society that blows children to bits of scrappy flesh in other countries filled with Muslims.

It’s a children’s book and it should be read as such. Silverstein was funny and logically assumed that parents were somehow able to prevent their children from lighting the house on fire.

‘A Primer For Adults Only’

That’s a label for our times, isn’t it?

Totally a book for kids — though from a time when liability lawyers didn’t really hold sway. I got the jokes. Mostly. Or wanted to, which is the real power of books like this.

Most definitely, NOT a book for “adults only” — cripes — ask my kids!

Not for wee little ones who won’t get the joke. Age of reason and appreciation for my kids was around 8 or so for most of the book. Explaining the concept of a gigalo was a little older. No way would I have read the “give daddy a free haircut while he’s napping!” stuff to my kids when they were 4 or 5, even with me saying “isn’t that SILLY?”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18162731

The set-up is all in the introduction. It’s about how uncle Shelby has thought about the children. Thought about them when they were making noise late at night, or tearing up his lawn, etc. And how he wrote the book so that the children would get everything they so richly deserved.

Actually the G is for gigolo page sort of had the desired effect because when I didn’t get the joke, I asked my mom what a gigolo was… Good times.

Make a circle around the number of nice little green apples you ate today:
1 2 3 4 7 12 26 38 57 83 91 116

Does this ever actually happen? To read the internets you’d think there was an epidemic of Diet Coke/Pepsi-ruined keyboards from all the ROTFLMAOing.

And why were you reading it at your computer anyway? It’s a book! You shouldn’t download stuff illegally! You should support deserving authors (or authors’ families in this case I suppose).

P.S. Got a link?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVfE_-ZJAxc

;-)

It’s a long way back to Kansas and Philip Pullman ain’t gonna get you there.

I always had “A Light in the Attic” and “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” it it was filled with poems just as “subversive” as these. It tells kids to always sprinkle pepper in their hair. There’s the great one about the girl who died of a broken heart after her parents wouldn’t get her a pony (and includes the note: “This is a great poem to read to your parents when they don’t get you something they want.) And who can forget “If you have to wash the dishes”?

Really, the kids are brighter than you seem to think they are, and this book is no different from any of his others.

I agree, these ARE children’s books. Adult coddle their kids way too much.