At a certain age, the urge to read and the urge to chew are much the same thing. The teething reader is lucky this season, with a buffet of board books to choose from.

Marthe Jocelyn employs her signature collage style in A Day with Nellie, a slightly pared-down version of her 2002 picture book of the same title. From “good morning” to “sweet dreams,” we follow Nellie through a day of meals, play, napping, mess, and moods. We used to think that the artistry in nursery books was to keep parents from expiring from boredom on the 300th reading, offering “plums for moms,” so to speak. Now, according to recent research, it seems that nothing is lost on the genius brains of babies. Jocelyn gives both parties lots to contemplate and discuss. We are treated to a clutch of concepts – questions, opposites, emotions, colours, adjectives, counting, the alphabet, and naming. There is even a pair of mathematical formulas: “Dirt plus water make Nellie muddy. Soap plus water make Nellie clean.” All is held together by being structured around a toddler’s day.  

The pictures are a delicious mixture of textures, composed of fabric, paper, beads, buttons, ribbon, bits of grass, and macaroni. The macaroni, incorporated into a border of pasta shapes, suggests another time-honoured use for baby books – as inspiration for parent-child conversations. The text proper, revealing a deep knowledge of juvenile food preferences, reads, “Afternoon turns to evening. Now it’s supper time. Nellie has noodles again.” Close and repeated looking at the pasta in the border reveals that conchiglie are the same shape as the shell soap dish of the previous page and that farfalle echo the bow on Nellie’s party dress.

The original audience for Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie is now well into parental age, and the board book Alligator Tales is ready and waiting for the new generation. Lee’s The Rocking Chair was first published in the collection Bubblegum Delicious in 2000. Here it gets a book of its own, as well as jaunty, child-pleasing illustrations by Argentinean illustrator Nora Hilb. In it, a carrot-haired narrator celebrates the pleasures of his rocking chair. “I love to rock/ In the rocking chair./ I rock rock rock/ With my teddy bear.” He levitates, rocks through a storm, rocks around the block in his underwear (pause for belly laugh), then invites two other children to join him to rock off into space and dreamland.

Lee’s rhythm never falters, and a few rounds of this one are likely to lull parents, if not their children, into contented sleep, especially as the teddy, who increases in size on every page, ends up enclosing the children in what looks like the most comfortable bed in the universe.

Another Dennis Lee board book offering this season is an original poem called This Little Puppy, also illustrated by Nora Hilb. We get the whole emotion-rich drama from the very first page. “This little puppy goes bow-wow-WOW./ This little puppy wants to walk right now./ This little puppy says it’s time for chow,/ And this little puppy needs a home.” A disconsolate puppy in a sodden cardboard box sits crying on a city sidewalk. But what’s that, coming in from the edge of the page? Two legs, one in a gumboot, one in a running shoe. Help is at hand in the form of a small girl and her smaller brother. So far it’s surefire, but the book gives us more in the form of two very satisfying surprises. The first involves a pair of blackbirds – surely cousins of Heckle and Jeckle – who wryly observe the proceedings and then opportunistically zoom in for a chunk of puppy chow. The other surprise is that a baby, first seen on the title page and then forgotten, aids the puppy’s rescue.

Reliable sources tell me that even after children graduate from their board books, they still take their favourites to bed. This Little Puppy is a great example of a book that grows with the child, not only because it features three protagonists of varying ages, but because it is perfect for trying to get the hang of reading. The book contains 101 words, but has only 25 different ones. Its basic call-and-response structure makes joining in inevitable, and even if you recognize only the word “puppy,” you can read part of every page. In any case, sometimes all you need is what Nellie has at the end of her day: “a story and a snuggle with Daddy.”