Kids who are as slow as "a handful of honey" just when they most need to hurry up aren't trying to be contrary. They are thinking.
The Thinking Book, first published in 1960, brilliantly champions daydreaming. Though no people are pictured, an adult is trying to rush a child through the day's task of getting ready, and the dreamy child is mightily distracted. When the adult says, "Put on that shirt, the yellow one," the child's inner voice is, "thinking/ I was thinking/ of all the pieces of dust that float/ and shine/ in the sunshine." The request to wash both hands just makes the child imagine "waves and jewels in the caves," and the command to put on shoes and socks sets a rhyming train of thought in motion: "I was thinking of wheels/ I was thinking of eels and seals."
Author Sandol Stoddard Warburg (I Like You) has a history of charming the shoes and socks off readers, and world-class designer-artist Ivan Chermayeff's bright, childlike paintings are simple and spare, leaving plenty of breathing room for individual flights of fancy. On one page, the adult says "Please!" as a delightful gray elephant is blowing out three candles on a cake, and the child is thinking, " I love you a billion/ a zillion/ a whillion/ a gorillian/ a hippopillion/ a rhinocerillion/ an elephantillion." Children who get lost in their own worlds will feel understood--and adults are offered a soft-focus new lens with which to view the occasional agony of getting a child ready to go. A classic. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness