I love a good bedtime story, and now Arlo is a little older we tend to read one together with Athena on the sofa as he’s too heavy to hold and read if we go into Athena’s room and if I leave him to his own devices on her mid-sleeper he tries to go backwards off it! We were recently sent a lovely book of bedtime stories from Parragon and we’ve been working our way through them . My two still have fairly small attention spans so we don’t always finish a story each night (though they aren’t that long!) but as they’re getting more used to it we’re getting more of each story read at a time. There are classics fairytales and more modern ones, a really good mix of stories. I think a proper bedtime story is a great way to wind down before bed, about half an hour before we pick a story to read together, though at the moment Athena seems to really love watching kids yoga on youtube before bed too, so now its more of a wind down hour of yoga and then a story but I think perhaps she’s just starting to drag out bedtime on purpose!
The book has some lovely illustrations to accompany the stories, and the hard back cover means it will last well, and maybe even be passed on to future generations!
The other latest favourite of Athena’s is the Convertible Playbook Castle from Miles Kelly. Its a clever book that opens out to a castle with a moat and lots of press out characters to play with, act stories out with and generally have a good time with! The book explains a little history about castles, and medieval tournaments. The pop out pieces are made of card and include dragons, knights on horses, princesses and ‘commoners’ and my only criticism of the playbook is that the little stands that press out to slot onto the bottom of the characters are a bit flimsy and they don’t always stay stood up well, well not under my toddlers fairly rough handling! Plastic stands would be preferable but then you’d need to keep them apart from the book which would be a bi daft. The pieces can be stored in the castle when folded and when the book is shut they won’t fall out, so great for keeping it all together for storage. We reviewed a similar activity book recently too, the Convertible Submarine book also from Miles Kelly which is still getting a lot of use with both kids!
These books were sent for review purposes, and this post contains affiliate links for which I will get a very small amount of pennies should you purchase via these links.