OUR NEW BABY

This entry in the How Do I Feel About series is a delightfully frank exploration of sibling sentiment when a baby joins (or is about to join) the household. Green (see review, above) features four models of different ages, sizes, and races and assigns them personalities and family situations (some have step-parents), and through dialogue balloons displays their feelings on a number of topics: worries about not being loved anymore or ignored, troubles that simply arise from new circumstances, anger that comes from having to share a parent’s time, and the heavy demands a baby places on the entire household in terms of sleep and attention. The author offers sensible responses to these feelings—how they are natural, how the love and caring in a family stays the same—without diminishing that there are changes afoot and it is time to prepare for them. The drawback is the inept design of the book, with cut-out photographs of the children pasted onto pages of cartoons and text. (Picture book. 6-8)