Parenting

Books for 0-6-year-olds

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As the saying goes for gifts, “Give them something to read/ Something they want and something they need”, I thought I would share some book recommendations. I wouldn’t hesitate to buy any of these as a present for my nephews or our friends’ children. After comparing Usborne versus DK versus National Geographic, I think that DK has the best ratio of information per age, with the right amount of information. Of course, this is just a personal opinion. Also, I discovered two very worrisome …

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The Magical Wimmelbooks

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One of my happiest childhood moments was when I got lost in books. After having a child, children’s books made me feel like I was reborn as a child, too. One of the most requested books in our household is In the Town All Year Round by Sussane Berner Rotraut. This was my first exposure to wimmelbooks, a special form of picture books with hidden objects. Wimmelbooks are a distinctive type of picture book characterized by their large-format, wordless illustrations filled with intricate details. These books are primarily …

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Crafting Intuition, from Chaos Theory to Motherhood

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At the end of one of his lectures, Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky recommended Chaos: Making a new science, a book by James Gleick. While reading it, the following quote struck me: When I came into this game, there was a total absence of intuition. One had to create intuition from scratch. Intuition as it was trained by the usual tools – the hand, the pencil, and the ruler – found these shapes [fractals] quite monstrous and pathological. The old intuition was misleading. The first …

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