By Mem Fox
A rhyme that travels the whole round world visiting babies born in all sorts of places, and comes back every time to the same warm fact: each one has ten little fingers and ten little toes.
A baby is born far away in the hills. Another is bundled up warm in the snow. There's one in a tent, one in a busy town, one on an island out in the sun. Mem Fox's rhyme goes all the way around the world, meeting babies who look different and live in different places, and every time it comes back to the same thing: they all have ten little fingers and ten little toes. Helen Oxenbury's round, beaming babies crawl and wave across soft cream-colored pages. At the very end the rhyme scoops them all up and comes home to the one baby in your lap, who has ten little fingers, ten little toes, 'and three little kisses on the tip of its nose.'
The rhyme is soft and rocking, the kind you say slow and close, and the refrain comes back every couple of pages so your baby learns to wait for it. It shows babies from all sorts of places and families, every one of them loved and delightful, so a very young child takes in a whole wide world before they have words for any of it, and finds their own ten fingers and ten toes right in the middle of it. And it ends in a kiss. The last page literally hands you a reason to kiss your baby's nose. That's why it sits on so many first bookshelves and turns up at so many baby showers.