Everywhere Babies Padded: A Delightfully Illustrated Rhyming Celebration of Playing, Sleeping, and Crawling

Love this book! Fabulous baby gift or for a toddler! The illustrations are gorgeous and the message is delightful.

"Everywhere Babies" is as close to a perfect board book as I've found. For years, we read this book every night to my children, and the rhyme and rhythm of this book is so great, we memorized it easily (useful for exhausted parents!). The rhyming works without some of the tortured grammar twisting that many authors have to resort to. This is not a story book, more of a concept book, and the author leaves plenty of room for the illustrator to take the book to the next level. The illustrations by Marla Frazee are adorable, and reflect a wide range of babies and their adults. There's enough going on in the vignettes that even a toddler can stay engaged in this book, and is a book that would be ideal to keep around for an older child learning to read. The illustrations provide plenty to discuss with a curious child. There are representations of many races and family situations, which is a lovely and welcome part of this book. This book is a great baby shower gift for parents, or even for a one- or two-year-old's birthday. Wrap it up with a swaddle blanket and you are all set!

This was my daughter’s favorite for the first few years of her life, and now it’s my go to baby gift. Such a sweet and beautiful book to read together, every baby’s favorite subject!

My 2-year-old son picked this book out at the library and adores it. He likes the smiling messy baby at the end, and has learned descriptive words like "messy" and "small" from talking about the pictures. The text is simple and repetitive, and the pictures are gentle and witty. The focus is on the babies themselves and all the things they experience and do. Many but not all of the babies are smiling-- some are serious, some are curious, some are yelling, some look a bit annoyed, just like real babies do, which adds to the charm. I also like the variety of families represented, and the fact that we see old people and people not in perfect physical shape nurturing and having fun with babies as well as typical 20-something-looking parents. It's not always clear who is related to whom in this book. The relationships are portrayed subtly (is that a neighbor or a dad? a grandma or a child-care provider? a pal or a partner?) -- we are left to imagine the families as we wish to. The thing that's clearly most important is that everyone loves the babies. We parents find that the illustrations hold our interest after many readings, a real treat. We love this book.

I bought this book for my twin grandsons who are two years old. It is an adorable picture book that depicts infants to preschool aged children doing things and going places with their parents. In one illustration, there is a street full of adults, including two males walking together. They could be a father and son or two brothers. They are not necessarily gay. In another picture, there are two adult males sitting next to each other at the park, not too close or anything. One of adult males is holding a baby in his lap, the other is holding a pair of shoes that obviously do not belong to the baby, and probably belong to a little girl on a play structure in stocking feet. The two males could be two friends or just two guys talking about sports while their kids play play at the park. In both pictures, the males could also be gay, I suppose, but there are so many other ways you could interpret their relationship that it seems a stretch to say it has LGBTQ imagery.

Babies love to look at pictures of other babies. Buy this baby book and your 0-18 month-old will be delighted. It's sweet, gentle, and features babies of all different races and ethnicities, so your little one is sure to find his or her twin. And parents won't get tired of the low-key, approachable text either!

I gave this a 4 star for one reason. There are a couple of drawings of babies that could seem a bit scary to my grandsons (a baby wailing with gaping mouth). But otherwise a clever book with good artwork

This is a beautiful book that I loved reading to my children and that I have given many times as a baby gift. One of the things I liked (that other reviewers have not always appreciated) is the diversity of those pictured in the book -- different ages, different races. As some negative reviews have pointed out, there are some men or women seen together -- these can be but need not be interpreted as same-sex couples. If you are not ready to explain to your children that some babies have two daddies (which is a fact about the actual world) then just say those guys sitting together are friends watching their kids play at the playground. What's the big deal? But for those of us who want our children's books to reflect real life -- which has a variety of people in it, some of whom look like you and some of whom do not -- this is a great book.