Reviews of
Lisa Brown's
Baby Be of Use
Books.
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To order
the Baby Be of Use books,
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New York Post
"A Tip of the Glass for Child Labor"
By Mandy Stadtmiller
August 10, 2006
Teach your toddler how to fix you a martini, make you a hangover-cure breakfast, change the oil in your car and apply for a home equity loan.
Sound too good to be true?
Not to illustrator and humorist Lisa Brown, whose two latest additions ("Baby Fix My Car" and "Baby Do My Banking") to the four-book "Baby Be of Use" series came out this summer and are available together for $24 at mcsweeneys.net.
Sitting in her office in San Francisco, the 34-year-old author says she was frustrated by the dearth of educational children's books on the market.
"I had been reading all of these sappy board books," says Brown, who is mother to a 2 1/2-year-old, "and my son is learning how to say goodnight to the moon and pat a bunny, but nothing really interesting to me."
So Brown asked herself, what interests me? Cocktails! "Baby Mix Me a Drink" was born.
"They have really nice pleasing shapes and colors," she laughs, "and I thought, perfect, he can read about cocktails and I can enjoy cocktails."
Full of future ideas including "Baby Administer CPR" and the possibly more controversial "Baby Get Me Laid," Brown says she has only received a small amount of criticism from the sense-of-humor-challenged.
"I was at an event in Kansas," she recalls, "and I had this parent ask me, 'Are you afraid of sending mixed messages?'
"I said, 'I don't think the message is mixed at all. It's pro-cocktail.'"
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