By Karen Katz
A couple dreams of the baby waiting for them across the world, then flies out to bring her home and become a family.
It starts with a dream. A woman dreams that far, far away a baby has been born, and that this baby is hers. Then the phone rings, and it turns out to be true. The house fills up with a happy scramble. They pack one small bag with a bottle and a blanket and a toy, everyone waves them off, and the mother and father fly over mountains and clouds to a country they've never seen. And there she is. They hold her. They give her a name. They tell her that the woman who grew her, like a flower in her belly, couldn't take care of her, and so they came for her. Then they fly home, where the aunts and uncles and grandparents are all waiting at the door. Karen Katz painted the whole thing in hot pinks and oranges with a folk-art border around every page, and she wrote it after she and her husband adopted their own daughter.
For a three- or four-year-old this hits a real sweet spot: short, warm, patterned, and built exactly like the story a young child asks for again the next night. The plane, the packed bag, the crowd at the door are all concrete things a small child can hold onto, and a family made across an ocean gets to feel like a celebration instead of an explanation. Katz never names the country, so the story stretches to fit almost any child who came from somewhere else. And there's one plain sentence about the woman who grew her, sitting right in the middle of all the joy, which a lot of books at this age skip entirely.