"...and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street" by Dr Seuss (HarperCollins Children's Books)

Here's a Dr Seuss book we'd never seen before. Mr Geisel's prolific back catalogue is huge, so it's easy to miss golden little nuggets of booky goodness like this one. Delving into a child's imagination is the theme, and we join a young boy who is on his way home from school. Nothing much really happened during the day, and the boy's dad always asks "What have you been up to? What have you seen?"

A pause here - do other parents have the same thing going on with their children as we have with Charlotte? Where you enthusiastically ask "What did you do at school today?" only to be met with "Nothing much" or "Mehhh!"

(you later find out that the class went waterskiing, bathed a baby elephant, made cakes, went paragliding, performed open heart surgery on gnats, etc etc etc).

The book flips this idea on its head a little, and soon the boy is lost in a daydream of what he can tell his dad he has seen as he makes his way home along Mulberry Street. A simple horse and cart is transformed - becoming a reindeer and sled, a Rajah and his elephant, perhaps even an entire carnival!

As you'd expect from a Seuss book, the rhymes are absolutely pitch perfect, flowing deliciously. The illustrations are crazy, whacky, surreal and wonderful. The message is ace though, and we loved the way the book ends.

...and to think that I saw it all in the pages of a Dr Seuss book!


Charlotte's best bit: A Zebra, pulling a fancy cart!

Daddy's Favourite bit: The crazy mayhem of a full-scale carnival with a zillion floats