I bought this book for my 3 year old nephew who loves construction equipment, tractors, and the like. My sister told me after they got the book in the mail that it had been very hard to get him into any books, however, he was extremely interested in this one. He said goodnight to each piece of machinery and told my sister everything he knew about each one. A couple of days later I got a photo via text of him sitting on the floor of his bedroom flipping through the book. I'm so happy that this book has sparked an interest!

Trying to find a book to gift to a small neighbor who has a thing for stealing golf carts and REALLY wants to take a ride on our riding mower. Pretty sure this one would be absolutely perfect and it was pretty cute, too.

Great little book! Wish there were some girl construction trucks for my construction loving daughter!

Who knew that construction vehicles were gendered? And all male? Otherwise there were definitely things to like here. There was good description of different types of vehicles with decent art. I guess I found the anthropomorphized trucks just a little annoying. You could have done this whole book and had people. But a nicely different take on a bedtime book.

Creative and cute! I always yawn about 100 times while reading this book which I guess means it's working???

Read for CBR 6

Today you lovely people get to benefit from my

1) need to provide the newest arrivals in my family with quality children’s literature,
2) hatred for gift registries, and
3) understanding of the panic that occurs when tiny babies do not want to go to sleep.

My go-to gift for any occasion is a book. Or many books. I figure you, my fellow Cannonballers, have a similar notion that there is, somewhere in the universe, a perfect book to give as a gift for almost every reason. Good days, bad days, promotions, losses, stubbed toes, missing you moments: Books are good for them all. Not cure-alls, mind you, but just to show you care, to let the person know you’re thinking of them, whatever the reason may be. And for actual gift giving days – birthdays, parties, Christmases and the like? Books should be your first response.

So for my cousin’s upcoming baby shower, I gave the registry a brief glimpse – too much pink, too little I could actually afford – and happened to see that they’d requested the Johnson & Johnson’s bath wash that’s specifically for bedtime (in that it contains “soothing lavender essence”), and I figured I could work with that. So I put together a little care package of the baby wash, an adorable puppy softie (that is seriously so soft I want to keep it, but won’t), and some appropriately soothing bedtime books to add to the new kiddo’s routine.

I started with a couple of classics, which I am not going to bother reviewing: if you don’t know about the awesome that is Goodnight Moon, I’m not sure why you’re bothering to read this review at all. Other five-star favorites I included were Sandra Boynton’s The Going to Bed Book; Ten, Night, Eight by Molly Bang; and Good Night Gorilla, by Peggy Rathman. (All of these books are in board book form unless I mentioned otherwise, because gnawing on books should just be a given until a kid turns two-ish.)

Next up is Time for Bed, written by Mem Fox & illustrated by Jane Dyer, which came out in 1993, and I consider a staple of bedtime books, but the lady at the bookstore hadn’t heard of it (gasp!), so I figure maybe I should extol on its virtues a bit here for those who’ve missed out. The short, repetitive & rhyming text (“It’s time for bed little goose(animal), little goose(animal); the stars are out and on the loose (rhyme)”) are sweet, cozy and charming. The pictures are water-colored & dreamy, and easily recognizable for older kids, and – while it doesn’t have any of the little comic surprises of a Good Night, Gorilla or The Going to Bed Book – the simple, soothing pattern is one that kids tend to memorize quickly and learn to help you ‘read’ early on.

The last three books I chose were new to me:

The first, If Animals Kissed Good Night, by Ann Whitford Paul, with entertaining illustrations by David Walker, drew me in because of the adorable elephants on the cover, and works as a good companion to Time for Bed, as it goes through different animals and their progeny (bear and a cub, seal and a calf, parrot and chick, etc.) and how they might say good night. It’s more Suessian & playful – with its “splashity-splishes” and “mud-happy heaps”, but no less soothing or snuggly.

Hush Little Polar Bear, by Jeff Mack, is about the adventures a sleeping stuffed polar bear – and his
little girl – might get into in their dreams. All the “bouncing through pastures” and “creeping through caves” are lovingly drawn and the fuzzy bear somehow manages to safely navigate his way back to imagining that he’s safe and sound with the little girl, all tucked into bed, book laid out on top of the sheets. It’s cute, and it’s a little bit different from the others in that it’s neither a book about a specific routine (10,9,8 or Goodnight Moon, i.e.) or a book about imagined routines (all the rest). Dreams and adventures definitely need to have some space in the bedtime book line-up. (It’s more along the lines of a Harold and the Purple Crayon.)

Last – and the only non-board book, because I don’t think there is one – is Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, by Sherri Duskey Rinker and Tom Lichtenheld. I bought it specifically because my cousin is an architect and works at construction sites a lot, so his little girl should know about them, eventually. The book goes through all different pieces of equipment and what they do – crane truck, cement mixer, dump truck, etc – and then has them slowly ending their day and going to sleep, with a gentle rhyme & and a brightly colored illustration – “He lowers his bed, locks his gate; Rests his wheels; it’s getting late. He dims his lights, then shuts his doors, and soon his engine slows to snores. Shh… goodnight, Dump Truck, goodnight.”

There you have it: Baby’s first bedtime books, which stop here only because I ran out of money. (Given a bit more funding I would also include: Roar of a Snore; The Napping House; Steam Train, Dream Train; Moon Dreams ; Llama, llama Red Pajama; The Dream Jar; I Love You, Stinky Face)

Lovely illustrations capture the setting of the sun, dusk, and twilight in a way that manages to convey "night" without being just one blue-black page after another. I like all the rich vocabulary words packed into the rhyming verses. This one was a big hit at construction storytime.

A fairly cute book, but it doesn't really wow me. It was very obviously written and illustrated by people who aren't familiar with what happens on a construction site, or apparently even how physics works. There's lots of very random, disconnected, at times impossible activity. We see a "cement mixer" (truck) taking a bath to get shiny-bright, and a dump truck which has miraculously managed to get to the top of a giant pile of boulders. One picture shows an excavator surrounded by a willy-nilly arrangement of his day's work: some rectangular holes, a couple round holes, a pile of sand, a pile of boulders; pipes sticking out in random directions; and each trench/hole has the dug-out soil neatly and evenly distributed all around its perimeter. I kept looking at the (otherwise charming) oil pastel illustrations and thinking, that's not how this works! That's not how any of this works! and I am by no means a construction expert.

Sure, we can overlook these inaccuracies because this is a book for toddlers and because we're already pretending that trucks go to bed at night; but I generally prefer not to teach kids nonsense (even while anthropomorphizing, or taking some liberties with fiction). Why should we, when there's some fierce competition, like the stellar [b:Billions of Bricks|27414420|Billions of Bricks|Kurt Cyrus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1448831474l/27414420._SX50_.jpg|47463573]. Now this is a book that was created by people who care about every last detail. (Caveat: Billions of Bricks was written for older kids, and it's not a bedtime book. But it is a flawless example of how amazing a children's book can be when people go the extra mile.)

So... yeah. This is a cute book for toddlers who are obstructed with construction equipment, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise. Like many of the other reviewers have pointed out, this also is a sexist book, as all of the trucks are male, and why is that even still a thing. It did make me yawn though, so it's definitely not the worst bedtime book I've come across.