Oh, what a pleasure to review this book.
Nursies When the Sun Shines (Katherine Havener, 2011) is a children's book for explaining night weaning. It features a family (mother, father, baby) who are co-sleeping.
In it, the mother gently explains to her toddler that she will nurse when the sun comes up, but that when it's dark outside "nursies sleep."
This is the first book which helps parents explain what can be a difficult concept to understand and even harder to put into practice, especially when co-sleeping.
The text is simple and tender:
At night time, we sleep.
Baby sleeps, Mommy sleeps.
Nursies sleep at night.
The illustrations in this book are gorgeous. The joyous expression on the child's face when at last the sun has risen is just unmistakable. And the father kissing the baby's head while she nurses is precious.
I've met so many co-sleeping mothers of toddlers who find themselves acting as an "open bar" at night. And it's hard to explain, in a way that a toddler can understand, that you want to sleep at night. By using the sun as a guidepost, this book does a beautiful job of gently introducing a system that can work for everyone.
Of course, to fully understand the concepts in the book a child would need to be able to recognize light and dark times of day. But I'll start reading this book to my daughter now because it's so beautiful and it's on one of her favorite topics!
Katherine Havener has generously offered an autographed copy of this book to a lucky reader of this blog. To enter, leave a comment below by June 7, 2011. Winner will be chosen using random.org. Winner will be notified by email and announced in the comments section. U.S. addresses only, please. If winner does not respond within three days an alternate winner will be chosen, which would be a bummer.
*I was provided a review copy of this book.
Follow Motherwear on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to the Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog with email updates and RSS feeds. Subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes.
