Favorite Easter Book

This book was one of my very, very, very favorites from when I was little.  The illustrations in it, when I look at them now, are like looking at them yesterday, like being 5 years old again, yesterday. 

This was, I think, my favorite illustration, the rooms full of all different kinds of eggs.  It was a double spread, but I could not find a picture that included both pages. 

The egg  Mother Rabbit is holding in her hand is like
the one in the picture below. I remember we had one like
that at home when I was little too. It had yellow frosted
trim on the outside, instead of pink like this one.
You could look inside to a scene, of what I don't remember.
But every time I read this book, I remember that egg. It
used to sit in our cupboard above our stove, wrapped
in a plastic baggy, all year round, only taken out at Easter time.

And I remember the beautiful pink of the sky in this, and from the next illustration, and distinctly I recall the buds on the trees.

    
     Yesterday, the day before our four day Easter break, I pulled the book off my desk shelf at school and was feeling sad because I didn't have anyone to read it to this year. I totally would have read it to my 5th graders, but we are in the middle of a unit on Fairy Tales and are only a week away from State testing, so I really couldn't justify it, even to myself... 
     ANYWAY, I still had a class with 4 second graders to come, and what I normally do with them is follow a scripted phonics program for 42 minutes in that teacher's classroom. But yesterday, their teacher was in meetings and had a sub, and a terrible student teacher, and it is pretty chaotic in there anyway, so I made an executive decision. I pulled my 4 kids out, went back to my room across the hall, sat on the carpet and read The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes to them, and then we colored pictures of Easter eggs WE would deliver.  I justified it by the realization that, three of the four of them are smart enough to get the new lesson I skipped in ten seconds, and the other one wouldn't get it if I spent ten class periods on it, so...it was a wash. And I got to share my favorite book, and hoped that someday, maybe those kids would see that book at Easter time as adults, and remember the story and the illustrations and be glad that someone read it to them when THEY were little. 

http://www.rookno17.com/

And, as an added bonus, while I was looking for pictures of and from this book on google,
I ran across this blog where the woman made these cool little cupcakes to go along with the book.
I won't be doing that THIS Easter, but it is a neat idea I would love to do next year.  The shoes come from a chocolate mold, are chocolate, and just covered with gold luster dust. Even I could handle that, I think!