Amazing Baby

Amazing Baby, written by Desmond Morris author of the best-selling book The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal, covers baby’s development from conception through toddlerhood. The book has 9 chapters that are further broken down into one or two page sections that make the book easy to read in tiny time segments. Any parent knows that tiny time segments are often the only time we have for reading.

The book is written in a respectful, almost reverent, tone that celebrates the bond between mother and baby. I found myself actually tearing up at times while reading about the (and so the book is aptly named) amazing process that all my children have gone through and that I am witnessing now with my third child.

This book is not only aesthetically pleasing, with striking images of beautiful human babies and carefully formatted text, but it is also filled with interesting facts about human development.

For instance, in the section on bonding I recognized what Baby D is currently going through with separation anxiety emerging:

For the first few months after birth, human babies are not particularly choosy. They are happy to be cuddled by any caring adult who happens to pick them up. In this respect they are slow starters, because with many animals the newborn becomes tightly bonded with its mother from day one. Usually by about six months (although this may vary from four to eight months) the process begins in earnest for the human infant and he starts to become highly selective in whom he trusts.

Baby D is definitely highly selective about whom she trusts, and her little lip comes out in protest if someone picks her up when she’d rather be with Mom!

My two older kids were intrigued by the paper overlays of the baby’s skull, skeletal system, musculature and eye. M requested to look at the skeleton and recalled how she had learned about the body in Kindergarten last year.

The book itself is substantial both in size (9 x 10) and heft (208 pages) and qualifies easily as a beautiful coffee table book. But the book would also make a wonderful gift for any mother, whether she’s just had her first child (or is expecting her first) or had her children years ago.

In this video, the author tells a little more about his latest book:





Amazing Baby can be purchased online at Amazon. Visit the Parent Bloggers Network to read what other bloggers thought about Amazing Baby and other products.