Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The Honest Toddler: A Child's Guide to Parenting, by Bunmi Laditan

The Honest Toddler: 
A Child's Guide to Parenting
Author: Bunmi Laditan
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: May 7, 2013
I was going to write one of those "10 Books I'd Recommend for Mother's Day" posts but then I thought, as a mother, I'd reward myself for all my hard work by not making myself do one of those posts. It's my Mother's Day present to myself this year. I'm just not that great at those recommendation lists. Also, Mother's Day was two months ago. But there is one book I'd definitely recommend to fellow moms, particularly to fellow moms of toddlers: The Honest Toddler: A Child's Guide to Parenting

If you're not familiar with The Honest Toddler blog, you are really missing out. Told from the point of view of a two-year-old, the blog is filled with helpful and stern advice for parents like, "serving broken crackers makes you look unprofessional" and "date night tears families apart" as well as salient observations such as "funny how you can live inside someone's body for almost a year but a 1AM grilled cheese is taking it too far." It is BY FAR the funniest blog/twitter feed I have read this year (though The Bloggess is darn close).

Of all the blogs-turned-books released in recent years, this is the one I was most excited about. The post about lasagne being "pasta having the worst day of its life" left my partner and I in tears we were laughing so hard. I would have been perfectly happy if the whole book was just transcribed verbatim from the website. But it isn't exactly like that. A lot of the same material is there, but it's arranged into more traditional book categories, making it more like a parenting guide (except the advice is the exact opposite of most parenting books, and in fact it advises to just go ahead and throw out all those other parenting guides).


Bottom line? The book is pretty darn great. It's not quite as good as the blog, but that's an almost impossibly high bar because, like I said, it's one of my favourite blogs of all time. I'd recommend just reading both. And celebrate by giving your precious toddler some juice (full strength because watering down is lying!) and unbroken crackers.

Disclaimer: I received a digital galley of this book free from NetGalley and also from Edelweiss (Above the Tree Line). I was asked to write an honest review, though not necessarily a favourable one. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.

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