By Patricia MacLachlan
The book for the first child, the one who turned two people into parents, and the book you give when a second baby is on the way.
This one is told to your child, not about them. It walks back through the firsts: the first night home, the first time they lifted their head, the first crawl, the first wobbling steps, the first run. The baby on the page grows a little with every turn, so by the end you've watched a whole small person arrive. And then MacLachlan lands the line the entire book was built for, which is that this child was the first to teach their parents how to be parents. That's the one that gets people. Stephanie Graegin's pencil-and-ink pictures are quiet and domestic, ordinary rooms and ordinary mornings, and they keep the whole thing from tipping into sugar. Nothing happens in it. That's fine. It's a book about being loved first.
When a new baby comes, the first child gets a lot of sentences that start with 'now that you're the big one.' This book doesn't do that. It doesn't mention the new baby at all, it doesn't hand your child a job, and it doesn't ask them to be pleased. It just goes back over their own firsts and tells them they were the beginning of this family. That's a much better answer to what a displaced three-year-old is actually asking, which is whether they still count. It also works perfectly well for an only child, where it reads as a straight celebration rather than a reassurance.