He turns a simple expression of love into a contest, telling the smaller hare that he will never be able to love as much. If Little Nutbrown Hare loves as high as he can reach, the joke is on him, because Big Nutbrown Hare has longer arms, so he must love more. And Big Nutbrown Hare, his caregiver, responds by one upping him. It’s the sort of desperate reaching for language that anyone who has ever been overcome by love would be familiar with. He’s trying to use physical measurements – I love you this much, I love you as high as I can hop, I love you down the lane as far as the river – to describe something immeasurable and unknowable. The plot surrounds Little Nutbrown Hare getting ready for bed (so great for bedtime stories), and trying to express how much he loves Big Nutbrown Hare. Their relationship is never explained, but it can be assumed that they represent parent and child, and both are identified as male with “he” pronouns. For the uninitiated, the book features two characters: Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare. I didn’t love it to the moon and back, and I didn’t even love it as high as I could reach. I’m a sucker for classics (you should hear me wax poetic about Winnie The Pooh) so I really wanted to love it. They show both visible brushstrokes and a kind of familiarity with rabbits that makes them seem more real, and they are both very animal-like and oddly human-like at the same time. The illustrations by Anita Jeram are charming – Big Nutbrown Hare and Little Nutbrown Hare are rendered with feeling, but also a kind of ease. The classic children’s book " Guess How Much I Love You" by Sam McBratney was gifted to us while I was still heavily pregnant. But more often than not, he is a baby rabbit, someone he calls “Little Brown Hay-er!” That would be Little Nutbrown Hare. Sometimes he is simply the neighbor’s dog.
Other times he is Te Ka, the lava monster from Disney’s Moana, and he has hot teeth which he has to brush with hot paste (to keep them hot, of course). Sometimes he is a robot, off to brush his robot teeth. On any given day, when my two-and-a-half-year-old heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth before bed, his other mom and I find ourselves with some creature other than a human child.
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