These are my 10 favorite Valentine books for kids, all available on Amazon:

1) I Love You Through and Through

2) The Day It Rained Hearts

3) A Book of Hugs

4) If You’ll Be My Valentine

5) Amelia Bedelia’s First Valentine

6) Henry In Love

7) You Are My I Love You

8) Kiss The Cow

9) Everyone Says I Love You

10) The Night Before Valentine’s Day

From Michele of  Michele Calderon Photography:

My favorite is one we’ve done since my kids were little.  Every year, I wrap 24 Christmas books and put them in a basket, and each night during December, one of the kids opens one before bed and we read it.  When we first started, I didn’t have 24 books, so we borrowed from the library.  (Since they were holiday books, they could only be out for 2 weeks, so they got special “open me first” wrapping paper LOL!)  But now we have more than enough……and the kids (ages 9, 12, and 14) still really look forward to it – they won’t even let me get rid of the old board and pop up books!

Many of our books were chosen from reading the Chinaberry catalog.  My favorite source for children’s books – you can get lost for hours in their detailed catalog.  www.chinaberry.com.  You’d love it!

Not long after Michele contacted me, Katie emailed this link for the same traditions and it shows ideas on how to do it as well as book recommendations!

Thank you Michele, this will be a new tradition for us THIS year. We LOVE books too and this fantastic idea of a tradition and couldn’t wait to start next year so I ordered some last night :)

Do you have favorite Christmas traditions? If you’d like to participate on here, let me know! I’ll be posting throughout December.

Okay so I have been drooling over the iPad since I found out about it. More about the iPad once I can get my hands on owning one.

The NOOKcolor from Barnes and Noble is close enough and I am so impressed with what it can do from the description. But the really cool feature? Just for kids: a whole collection of children’s books all in this cool little gadget. Features such as patent pending AliveTouch, where kids can be interactive with the story by touching the screen, zooming into a picture. etc. Also, you don’t have to feel guilty to lend your iPad to them.  ;)

My favorite is that you can practically bring all the books with you especially for traveling. No more figuring out which book to take and all the mounds of books in the car :) I don’t think these gadgets will ever replace an actual book to hold with its pages….but I love the new experience it is offering to kids, especially when it comes to practical packing :)

I have known about this beautiful heartfelt program since Gray was three years old and I signed her up right away. I have a love for books and I thought this program was so inspiring. Dolly Parton wanted every child to have books no matter where they were or what their family income. She wanted them to develop a love for reading, so she planted a seed. I signed up Campbell also, and every month, they look forward to getting their respective book in the mail. Every day Gray is eager to check the mail in hopes that a book will be in the mailbox.

We have also signed up other children who needed books, and our girls love the idea of surprising them.

Here is the warm fuzzy story for you!

The Story of Dolly’s Imagination Library (from website):

In 1996, Dolly Parton launched an exciting new effort to benefit the children of her home county in east Tennessee. Dolly wanted to foster a love of reading among her county’s preschool children and their families. She wanted children to be excited about books and to feel the magic that books can create. Moreover, she could insure that every child would have books, regardless of their family’s income.

So she decided to mail a brand new, age appropriate book each month to every child under 5 in Sevier County. With the arrival of every child’s first book, the classic The Little Engine That Could ™, every child could now experience the joy of finding their very own book in their mail box. These moments continue each month until the child turns 5—and in their very last month in the program they receive Look Out Kindergarten Here I Come.

Needless to say the experience has been a smashing success. So much so that many other communities clamored to provide the Imagination Library to their children. Dolly thought long and hard about it and decided her Foundation should develop a way for other communities to participate. The Foundation asked a blue ribbon panel of experts to select just the right books and secured Penguin Group USA to be the exclusive publisher for the Imagination Library. Moreover a database was built to keep track of the information.

Also, see how you can help HERE.

I HIGHLY encourage the book, The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections by Amanda Blake Soule.

I found this book a little more than a year ago online and it has renewed my passion for handmade crafts, family celebrations and rituals, and hoping my children will embrace and enjoy a creative life.

My favorite chapters are:

Preparing Your Creative Mind

Encouraging Imagination

Supporting Your Young Artist

Capturing Moments

Everyday Rituals

Celebrating Your Family (possibly my most favorite chapter and where I got the idea of birthday crowns and garlands)

Amanda writes, “Creativity goes deeper than the “art” sense of the word; it encompasses a whole way of living and being.”

Visit her fun and creative blog, www.soulemama.com

Did you know that when I was in the 6th grade, I had a goal to read at least 40-50 books a year? After a successful year, this went on until my junior year of high school when I got too busy being involved in academics and extracurricular activities.

I also loved going to the library, especially during their book fair. Oh I would RUN to it when it was our turn to go. Over the years my favorite authors were Judy Blume, R.L Stine, Christopher Pike, Anne Martin of The Babysitter’s Club (I had the entire collection of course), Mary Higgins Clark, Robin Jones Gunn, and the list goes on. This was before Barnes and Noble, laptops, and the internet, where its not all about the books anymore…

Nowadays, I am lucky to read through two books a year for myself, and if I do read them it would most likely be business books. I hope to change this pace soon. Also, I read plenty to my girls and I have become reacquainted with some amazing children’s books. I would buy the books from Amazon and others online, find a fun one from Anthropologie, or rummage through a used book store here in town. But nothing compares to going to the library and borrowing the books. The experience of picking them out for your kids and WITH your kids is so fun and memorable. I have been taking Gray since she was a year old while we lived in FL and I’m excited to share this experience with Campbell as well. We try to go once every two weeks and borrow at least 5-10 books as well as a mixture of read-along (with CD) books and educational videos. I will be posting some of our favorite books on here and Gray is happy to be giving a mini report on some of them :)

There are so many fun things to be involved in at the library that it’s crazy not to take advantage of it. Our local library is small, but it has storytime during the day, family movie night, parent/infant class, computers for kids to play on while you choose books. And for the kids who are old enough to read, they have a fantastic reading program, as well as many other activities that are available.