I haven’t been the only one receiving books in the mail, of course. Penelope is the newest member of Nain’s (Welsh for grandmother) Book Club and she delights in what her Nain has picked out for her whenever we get a package.

I used to work with Sherry Lee at Simon & Schuster, so you have my guarantee that she is the loveliest person alive. Naturally, so too is her first kid’s book Going Up!, about all the people a young girl meets in the elevator of her apartment building. It’s a delightful ode to city living and Penny loves all the details, especially on the last spread.

Penny’s daycare has a theme every week and some stick and some don’t. Dinosaurs stuck. That’s why We Don’t Eat Our Classmates was perfect, what with it starring a T-Rex named Penelope. Don’t worry, she spits them all back out.

We’ve tried to be conscious about the books we bring home representing a variety of skintones, abilities, and cultures, but sometimes you need something a little obvious. Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi is a colourful way of looking at ways we can be more deliberately antiracist as a family.

Nain always sends a beautiful picture book and we’ve received several excellent ones lately. This or That: What Will You Choose at the British Museum is the kind of book you’ll read differently every time. Each spread has a question around the theme and what object you would pick, but with Penny I will also ask my own questions like, “What on this page has ears?” I suspect this will become a favorite.

Her father loves Astronomy, so How the Stars Came to Be is a beautiful addition to our library, a folktale with gorgeous illustrations.

It’s always interesting to see what book Penny gravitates first to in the boxes from Nain and the month that Maisy’s Construction Site arrived, none of the other books stood a chance. It’s a short boardbook with manipulatable elements but she was completely obsessed. Maisy was the first show she watched (episodes are on YouTube) and she still watches it two years later.