By Zack Bush
The one for the new dad — a father and his baby through the whole first year, with the refrain that this is the one who was made just for me.
A big bearded man in a trucker hat and a plaid shirt is holding a tiny ginger baby, and the rhyme just follows the two of them forward: the day she arrives, the nights, the feeding, the carrying, the first year turning into toddlerhood. Every few pages it comes back around to the same line, that you're the one made just for me. That refrain is the engine. De Lauretis paints them warm and close, mostly at very short range, so the pictures are almost all faces and hands and the space between a father and a baby he can hold in one forearm. There's no plot and no jeopardy. It's a man being flattened by love and saying so, over and over, for about three minutes.
Nearly every book on the new-baby table is addressed from a mother, or from a soft indeterminate voice that could be anybody. This one is a father's, plainly, on every page, and dads notice that. It's the gift for the man who is about to be handed a newborn and hasn't got a book in the pile that sounds like him. It also does the practical thing well: it's short, it rhymes, the refrain is easy to learn, and it survives being read in the dark at three in the morning by someone who is barely awake. There's a Father's Day version of this gift and a baby-shower version, and it works as both.