If you have girls in your household, you might be like me – scared to death of them growing up and having to discuss the, um, sensitive topics that girls deal with. 🙂 ha!!
Well, this book, The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls (American Girl Library) helped us tremendously in our household!! I am actually excited to share this with you…whereas a few months ago, I would have admitted that I was terrified!!
This book, put out by American Girl, is recommended for girls ages 8 and up. As you probably know, our girls are 8yrs and 7yrs. At first, I was going to just have one-on-one time with each girl and do this book separately with both of them. But, then I had the thought that they might be a little more talkative and learn a little more if they were together. And it has worked beautifully!!
We took this book and went through 1 chapter at a time over a period of a few months time. This week we got to the end of the book and we made it! I’m still alive! ha!
The book starts off very gently by going over basic body parts and how they work, what they do for us, etc. Things like eyesight, brushing our teeth, taking care of our bodies. Then, it moves ever so gently into the topic of puberty. It discusses things like body odor, hair in new places and then getting your first period. (sorry, but we are all grown ups here, right?) 🙂
I am SO glad that I read this book with my girls BEFORE any of these things started happening to their bodies! It wasn’t awkward at all, they didn’t know to be embarrassed, they asked lots of questions and overall it went SO well!! Now we have opened the lines of communication and I pray that in the future, when their bodies do start changing, that they won’t be scared or nervous, but will be prepared and knowledgeable. And, my prayer is that they will feel comfortable coming to me with more questions, since we have already talked about it several times.
Now, my next question is, what book do you read AFTER this one?? My girls were sad to see this book end!! wow!! So, I’d like to continue this “girl time” with them and am wondering if there are more good girly books out there like this…discussing things that they will be facing as they grow, etc. Any suggestions?
P.S. There are a few rather graphic drawings/cartoons on certain pages of this book, so always preview books like this to see what you are comfortable with. 🙂