By Margaret Wise Brown
One whole farm day, morning to dark, and by the last page every animal is asleep and so, with luck, is your child.
It's a single day in and around a big red barn. The animals wake up, and the horses and the cows and the little pink pig and a scritch-scratch flea go about their business in the sun. Then the light goes gold, then it goes, and everything settles into the hay. Margaret Wise Brown wrote it the way she wrote Goodnight Moon, in rhymes that slow down as the sun drops, and the book makes a point of telling you the children are away in the house, so the animals have the whole farm to themselves.
It's the whole farm in one book, at the pace a small child actually wants it. Every animal your child has been asking about is here, named, doing one plain thing, and the pictures are warm and dusty and gold. This is the farm as a peaceable place where the day just turns over, so nothing in it goes to market and nothing gets eaten. For the farm-mad two or three year old this is the one you'll end up reading at bedtime for a year, and it earns that.