Rating: WARTY!
I don't negatively review many children's books because I tend to pick them carefully than others, and I use a little more, shall I say, relaxed criteria for them than I do more mature reading material, for an assortment of reasons. In this case I can't recommend this because it just didn't seem to get the job done.
The premise here is that the kid is put to bed, but gets up and discovers a list of chores his mom has to do before she goes to bed. he decides to "help." The first oddity is that he's woken by his mom running the vacuum cleaner around, which seems like an odd thing to do when you've just put your young kid to bed. Seriously? No! You run that in the morning to help wake them up for school or daycare or whatever! Or you get a Roomba to do it while you're out.
So the kid reads the list of chores: Vacuum, pack lunches, wash dishes, do laundry, bathe babies, wash dog. The list seemed a bit much. Who does lunches the night before? Who washes the dog and does laundry on a weeknight? I get that the idea here is to convey to kids a list of things mom does, and to educate children, but this list seemed more contrived to educate us to see how dumb mom is than anything else. She doesn't make a fresh lunch in the morning? She doesn't put a load of laundry in before she starts vacuuming so she's multi-tasking? She doesn't do another load before she bathes the babies, and another before she bathes the dog? These things have to be done sequentially all on one night? Every night?! Mom is so forgetful that she needs a list with check-boxes? It didn't seem realistic and it sure didn't seem intelligent.
I know kids are far less picky about things than I am, but kids are typically a lot sharper than too many people are willing to credit them, and I'm sure some will see this list as bizarre. Besides, the point here is to educate kids about all the things that mom (and dad - who I note is highly conspicuous by his absence here) does, and it seems to me there are much better ways to do it than the one this book explores.
The kid isn't represented as being too sharp either, because he's assuming that mom has never done any parental chores before this night, and that she can't handle her "mom job." That's neither smart nor kind. And he simply makes her job ten times harder. The artwork is pretty decent, but there's more to a good children's book than pretty pictures - or at least there should be. For me there ought to be a strong educational component, and I was sorry to see what was potentially a good idea go waste via poor execution. I wish the author all the best with her young children's books, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one. But at least I can check it off my reading list!
