Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall, pictures by Barbara Cooney

If you want to feel grateful for our modern-day ease, just read this book! The wonderful illustrations help young and old readers alike to glimpse the time and labor involved in living in earlier days. Families relied on each other to survive! No wonder more families stuck together! We see a bag of wool sheared from his sheep in April, and how his wife "wove the wool on a loom from yarn spun at the spinning wheel from sheep sheared in April." We also learn how the daughter helps with the family income by knitting 5 pair of mittens from the sheep's wool, as well. 

With charming photos, this is a book to help grow your gratitude and appreciate how those whose lives we've built upon were so filled with hard work!

(New York: The Viking Press, 1979)

Mandy Sue Day by Roberta Karim, illustrated by Karen Ritz

Morning wind tickles my ear.

My eyes blink open. 

Down in the cornfield, crows caw and caw.

I sing along:

Today's the day

Yahoo hooray

Mandy Sue Day

today!

In Mandy Sue's family, each child gets a special day to choose what they do, a special meal with a special dessert included. Mandy Sue decides to spend the day riding her horse, enjoying her special dinner, and then sleeping in the hayloft in the barn. 

Besides the lovely prose, I love this book because you don't realize you are reading about a blind child until the very end. It was such a wonderful surprise the first time I read it that I reread it with the child at hand to see how Mandy Sue managed and to appreciate all that she could do independently. What a great book to help children learn more about blindness and how children with disabilities adapt!

Also a good book to celebrate fall, since this farming family celebrates the harvest season and hard work with their special individual days off.

(New York: Clarion Books, 1994)