By Eileen Spinelli
Three children, each missing a parent who's away serving, imagine where that mom or dad is right now, and wait for the day they come home.
Three different children take turns telling you about the parent they're missing. One boy's father is away on a ship, and he pretends the wind will carry his words out to sea. A girl's mother is flying somewhere far off, so she blows kisses up at the night sky and imagines her catching them. Another boy's father is driving a jeep somewhere dusty, so he tends the garden the way his dad taught him. Eileen Spinelli writes it in soft, repeating verse, and every story ends the same way: the homecoming, the running hug at the door. It's the one book here that shows a deployed mother as easily as a deployed father.
Because it shows THREE families, your child is very likely to find one that matches theirs, a mom away instead of a dad, a family that looks like yours, a job like the one your parent does. That recognition is the whole gift of it. And the imagining each child does, picturing exactly where their parent is and what they're doing, is a real comfort a child can copy, turning a scary blank into a picture they can hold.